I'd like to weigh in with some information that may not be well-known. Canada and the United States have an organ sharing agreement in place and have had for about 15 years. When a donor is identified and all local possible matches have been ruled out, the search for suitable recipients widens and sometimes results in the most suitable recipient being on the other side of the 49th Parallel. Cross-border organ donations are not common but do happen with enough regularity that there are concerns about fees charged by the facility of origin. Currently, when an organ crosses the border, the receiving facility pays $25,000 (about $40,000 CDN) for costs relating to supporting the donor and the retrieval process. Due to the larger population and differences in firearms and drunk-driving legislation and other cultural differences, slightly more organs come north than go south. As things stand now,
interprovincial transfers of organs do not carry any fees, a situation currently being debated and possibly subject to change, the rationale for this being that the costs are constant, and the facility of origin should not be on the hook for them. With provincial health care budgets being what they are, any shifting of costs on to someone else is to be applauded.
One thing that really bothered me (aside from the obvious) about the media accounts of what was happening in Durham was the continual reference to "life support" being the cause of Jesica's ultimate demise. It gives the public the erroneous impression that the usual life support (ventilators, drugs, blood products, etc) are more dangerous than the alternative, when what they were referring to was ECLS... ECMO... whatever we want to call it, which of course is a horse of a different colour. The risks associated with ECMO as bridge-to-transplant are well-known. The PICU where I work lost a youngster over the holidays to ECMO-related bridge-to-transplant complications. I'm left wondering why no one has attempted to correct this misinformation.
As an aside, I am the parent of a transplant recipient who is now 14 years out and in good health. He has life-long handicaps resulting from medical misadventure following his transplant, for which I would cheerfully throttle the responsible party if I could get my hands around his neck. The other night I Googled his name and discovered that he has devoted much of his career to learning as much as he can about the underlying causes of what happened to my son and making sure it doesn't happen to anybody else. So maybe I'll just keep my hands in my pockets...
Would you like to comment?
