Should Organ Donors Be Paid?
Deanna Santana had assumed that people on organ transplant lists received matches. She didn't know some died while waiting. But in May 2011, after her 17-year-old son, Scott, was killed in a car accident, she learned what a precious gift organ and tissue donation can be.
"I would estimate it cost our family about $4,000 for me to donate a kidney to a stranger."
His heart, lungs, kidneys, liver and pancreas saved five people. His corneas enabled two others to see. And his bones, connective tissues and veins helped 73 individuals.
The donation's impact had a profound effect on his mother as well. In September 2016, she agreed to donate a kidney in a paired exchange of four people making the same sacrifice for four compatible strangers.
She gave up two weeks' worth of paid vacation to recuperate and covered lodging costs for loved ones during her transplant. Eventually, she qualified for state disability for part of her leave, but the compensation was less than her salary as public education and relations manager at Sierra Donor Services, an organ procurement organization in West Sacramento, California.
"I would estimate it cost our family about $4,000 for me to donate a kidney to a stranger," says Santana, 51. Despite the monetary hardship, she "would do it again in a heartbeat."
While some contend it's exploitative to entice organ donors and their families with compensation, others maintain they should be rewarded for extending their generosity while risking complications and recovering from donation surgery. But many agree on one point: The focus should be less on paying donors and more on removing financial barriers that may discourage interested prospects from doing a good deed.
"There's significant potential risk associated with donating a kidney, some of which we're continuing to learn," says transplant surgeon Matthew Cooper, a board member of the National Kidney Foundation and co-chair of its Transplant Task Force.
Although most kidneys are removed laparoscopically, reducing hospitalization and recuperation time, complications can occur. The risks include wound and urinary tract infections, pneumonia, blood clots, injury to local nerves causing decreased sensation in the hip or thigh, acute blood loss requiring transfusion and even death, Cooper says.
"We think that donation is a cost-neutral opportunity. It, in fact, is not."
Meanwhile, from a financial standpoint, estimates have found it costs a kidney donor in the United States an average of $3,000 to navigate the entire transplant process, which may include time off from work, travel to and from the hospital, accommodations, food and child care expenses.
"We think that donation is a cost-neutral opportunity. It, in fact, is not," says Cooper, who is also Director of Kidney and Pancreas Transplantation at MedStar Georgetown Transplant Institute in Washington, D.C.
The National Organ Transplant Act of 1984 makes it illegal to sell human organs but did not prohibit payment for the donation of human plasma, sperm and egg cells.
Unlike plasma, sperm and eggs cells—which are "renewable resources"—a kidney is irreplaceable, says John J. Friedewald, a nephrologist who is medical director of kidney transplantation at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago.
Offering some sort of incentives could lessen the overall burden on donors while benefiting many more potential recipients. "We can eliminate the people waiting on the list and dying, at least for kidneys," Friedewald says.
On the other hand, incentives may influence an individual to the point that the donation is made purely for monetary gain. "It's a delicate balance," he explains, "because so much of the transplant system has been built on altruism."
That's where doing away with the "disincentives" comes into the equation. Compensating donors for the costs they endure would be a reasonable compromise, Friedewald says.
Depending on the state, living donors may deduct up to $10,000 from their adjusted gross income under the Organ Donation Tax Deduction Act for the year in which the transplantation occurs. "Human organ" applies to all or part of a liver, pancreas, kidney, intestine, lung or bone marrow. The subtracted modification may be claimed for only unreimbursed travel and lodging expenses and lost wages.
For some or many donors, the tax credit doesn't go far enough in offsetting their losses, but they often take it in stride, says Chaya Lipschutz, a Brooklyn, N.Y.-based matchmaker for donors and recipients, who launched the website KidneyMitzvah.com in 2009.
Seeking compensation for lost wages "is extremely rare" in her experience. "In all the years of doing this," she recalls, "I only had two people who donated a kidney who needed to get paid for lost wages." She finds it "pretty amazing that mostly all who contact don't ask."
Lipschutz, an Orthodox Jew, has walked in a donor's shoes. In September 2005, at age 48, she donated a kidney to a stranger after coming across an ad in a weekly Jewish newspaper. The ad stated: "Please help save a Jewish life—New Jersey mother of two in dire need of kidney—Whoever saves one life from Israel it is as if they saved an entire nation."
To make matches, Lipschutz posts in various online groups in the United States and Israel. Donors in Israel may receive "refunds" for loss of earnings, travel expenses, psychological treatment, recovery leave, and insurance. They also qualify for visits to national parks and nature reserves without entrance fees, Lipschutz says.
"There has been an attempt to figure out what would constitute fair compensation without the appearance that people are selling their organs or their loved ones' organs."
Kidneys can be procured from healthy living donors or patients who have undergone circulatory or brain death.
"The real dilemma arises with payment for living donation, which would favor poorer individuals to donate who would not necessarily do so," says Dr. Cheryl L. Kunis, a New York-based nephrologist whose practice consists primarily of kidney transplant recipients. "In addition, such payment for living donation has not demonstrated to improve a donor's socioeconomic status globally."
Living kidney donation has the highest success rate. But organs from young and previously healthy individuals who die in accidents or from overdoses, especially in the opioid epidemic, often work just as well as kidneys from cadaveric donors who succumb to trauma, Kunis says.
In these tragic circumstances, she notes that the decision to donate is often left to an individual's grieving family members when a living will isn't available. A payment toward funeral expenses, for instance, could tip their decision in favor of organ donation.
A similar scenario presents when a patient with a beating heart is on the verge of dying, and the family is unsure about consenting to organ donation, says Jonathan D. Moreno, a professor in the department of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania.
"There has been an attempt to figure out what would constitute fair compensation," he says, "without the appearance that people are selling their organs or their loved ones' organs."
The overarching concern remains the same: Compensating organ donors could lead to exploitation of socioeconomically disadvantaged groups. "What's likely to finally resolve" this bioethics debate, Moreno foresees, "is patient-compatible organs grown in pigs as the basic science of xenotransplants (between species) seems to be progressing."
Cooper, the transplant surgeon at Georgetown, believes more potential donors would come forward if financial barriers weren't an issue. Of the ones who end up giving a part of themselves, with or without reimbursement, "the overwhelming majority look back upon it as an extremely positive experience," he says. After all, "they're lifesavers. They should be celebrated."
Few things are more painful than a urinary tract infection (UTI). Common in men and women, these infections account for more than 8 million trips to the doctor each year and can cause an array of uncomfortable symptoms, from a burning feeling during urination to fever, vomiting, and chills. For an unlucky few, UTIs can be chronic—meaning that, despite treatment, they just keep coming back.
But new research, presented at the European Association of Urology (EAU) Congress in Paris this week, brings some hope to people who suffer from UTIs.
Clinicians from the Royal Berkshire Hospital presented the results of a long-term, nine-year clinical trial where 89 men and women who suffered from recurrent UTIs were given an oral vaccine called MV140, designed to prevent the infections. Every day for three months, the participants were given two sprays of the vaccine (flavored to taste like pineapple) and then followed over the course of nine years. Clinicians analyzed medical records and asked the study participants about symptoms to check whether any experienced UTIs or had any adverse reactions from taking the vaccine.
The results showed that across nine years, 48 of the participants (about 54%) remained completely infection-free. On average, the study participants remained infection free for 54.7 months—four and a half years.
“While we need to be pragmatic, this vaccine is a potential breakthrough in preventing UTIs and could offer a safe and effective alternative to conventional treatments,” said Gernot Bonita, Professor of Urology at the Alta Bro Medical Centre for Urology in Switzerland, who is also the EAU Chairman of Guidelines on Urological Infections.
The news comes as a relief not only for people who suffer chronic UTIs, but also to doctors who have seen an uptick in antibiotic-resistant UTIs in the past several years. Because UTIs usually require antibiotics, patients run the risk of developing a resistance to the antibiotics, making infections more difficult to treat. A preventative vaccine could mean less infections, less antibiotics, and less drug resistance overall.
“Many of our participants told us that having the vaccine restored their quality of life,” said Dr. Bob Yang, Consultant Urologist at the Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust, who helped lead the research. “While we’re yet to look at the effect of this vaccine in different patient groups, this follow-up data suggests it could be a game-changer for UTI prevention if it’s offered widely, reducing the need for antibiotic treatments.”
MILESTONE: Doctors have transplanted a pig organ into a human for the first time in history
Surgeons at Massachusetts General Hospital made history last week when they successfully transplanted a pig kidney into a human patient for the first time ever.
The recipient was a 62-year-old man named Richard Slayman who had been living with end-stage kidney disease caused by diabetes. While Slayman had received a kidney transplant in 2018 from a human donor, his diabetes ultimately caused the kidney to fail less than five years after the transplant. Slayman had undergone dialysis ever since—a procedure that uses an artificial kidney to remove waste products from a person’s blood when the kidneys are unable to—but the dialysis frequently caused blood clots and other complications that landed him in the hospital multiple times.
As a last resort, Slayman’s kidney specialist suggested a transplant using a pig kidney provided by eGenesis, a pharmaceutical company based in Cambridge, Mass. The highly experimental surgery was made possible with the Food and Drug Administration’s “compassionate use” initiative, which allows patients with life-threatening medical conditions access to experimental treatments.
The new frontier of organ donation
Like Slayman, more than 100,000 people are currently on the national organ transplant waiting list, and roughly 17 people die every day waiting for an available organ. To make up for the shortage of human organs, scientists have been experimenting for the past several decades with using organs from animals such as pigs—a new field of medicine known as xenotransplantation. But putting an animal organ into a human body is much more complicated than it might appear, experts say.
“The human immune system reacts incredibly violently to a pig organ, much more so than a human organ,” said Dr. Joren Madsen, director of the Mass General Transplant Center. Even with immunosuppressant drugs that suppress the body’s ability to reject the transplant organ, Madsen said, a human body would reject an animal organ “within minutes.”
So scientists have had to use gene-editing technology to change the animal organs so that they would work inside a human body. The pig kidney in Slayman’s surgery, for instance, had been genetically altered using CRISPR-Cas9 technology to remove harmful pig genes and add human ones. The kidney was also edited to remove pig viruses that could potentially infect a human after transplant.
With CRISPR technology, scientists have been able to prove that interspecies organ transplants are not only possible, but may be able to successfully work long term, too. In the past several years, scientists were able to transplant a pig kidney into a monkey and have the monkey survive for more than two years. More recently, doctors have transplanted pig hearts into human beings—though each recipient of a pig heart only managed to live a couple of months after the transplant. In one of the patients, researchers noted evidence of a pig virus in the man’s heart that had not been identified before the surgery and could be a possible explanation for his heart failure.
So far, so good
Slayman and his medical team ultimately decided to pursue the surgery—and the risk paid off. When the pig organ started producing urine at the end of the four-hour surgery, the entire operating room erupted in applause.
Slayman is currently receiving an infusion of immunosuppressant drugs to prevent the kidney from being rejected, while his doctors monitor the kidney’s function with frequent ultrasounds. Slayman is reported to be “recovering well” at Massachusetts General Hospital and is expected to be discharged within the next several days.