Patients could be kept alive solely so they can become organ donors, hearts could be retrieved from newborn babies for the first time, and body parts could be taken from high-risk donors as part of an urgent medical and ethical revolution to ease Britain's chronic shortage of organs, doctors' leaders say.
In an effort to increase living organ donation, 15 states passed tax deductions and 1 a tax credit to help defray potential medical, lodging and wage loss costs between 2004 and 2008. To assess the impact of these policies on living donation rates, we used a differences-in-differences strategy which compares the pre- and post-legislation change in living donations in states that passed legislation against the same change in those states that did not. We found no statistically significant effect of these tax policies on donation rates. Furthermore, we found no evidence of any lagged effects, differential impacts by gender, race or donor relationship, or impacts on deceased donation. Possible hypotheses to explain our findings are: the cash value of the tax deduction may be too low to defray costs faced by donors, lack of public awareness about the existence of these policies, and that states that were proactive enough to pass tax policy laws may have already depleted donor pools with pr
A 21-year-old man has donated a quarter of his liver to a complete stranger in the first UK operation of its kind. Daniel Broadhead, who underwent the four-hour operation in December, says he made the decision on purely altruistic grounds, But this selfless act carries risks - there is a chance of one death in 200 procedures and the long-term effects on donors' health are not fully understood, experts say.