The number of patients in Israel who die while waiting for a transplant rose last year, and the number of transplantations fell by 20%, the annual report of the Ministry of Health’s National Transplant and Organ Donation Centre has said. As a result the shortage of organs has become more acute. Rafi Biar, chairman of the centre’s steering committee and director of the Rambam Medical Centre in Haifa, said that the main cause of the decrease is a new law that changed the protocol for defining “brain death” after discussions with the Chief Rabbinate. According to Jewish law death can be determined only after cardiopulmonary failure, and until recently the Chief Rabbinate had prohibited organ donation, as it did not recognise brain stem death. However, in 2008 the Israeli parliament passed a law that defines “brain respiratory” death as an indication of death for all legal purposes and also outlined the procedure that should be carried out to ensure that death had occurred.
Days after an Israeli court made a landmark ruling allowing the family of a deceased 17-year-old girl to harvest and freeze the eggs from her ovaries, the family has apparently bowed to domestic pressure to drop efforts to push ahead with the procedure. The family of Chen Aida Ayish, who was gravely injured in a car crash 10 days ago, had appealed to the court to extract her eggs after doctors declared her brain dead, Israeli media had reported. The court's ruling was unprecedented in Israel, and possibly globally, but immediately sparked a backlash from religiously conservative communities in Israel, a source familiar with the case said yesterday, prompting the family not to take the case any further. Ms Ayish, 17, fell into a coma after she was hit by a car 10 days ago. Doctors at the Kfar Saba hospital pronounced her brain dead last Wednesday, and her parents decided to donate her organs, and probe the possibility of harvesting her eggs.