NEW YORK (AP) - Saving the living has always been the No. 1 priority for a New York City ambulance crew. But a select group of paramedics may soon have a different task altogether: saving the dead. The city is considering creating a special ambulance whose crew would rush to collect the newly deceased and preserve the body so that the organs might be taken for transplant.
The "rapid-organ-recovery ambulance," still in the early planning stages, could raise a host of ethical questions and strike some families as ghoulish. But top medical officials in the Fire Department and Bellevue Hospital say it has the potential to save hundreds of lives.
Generally in the U.S., only people who die at hospitals are used as organ donors, because doctors are on hand with life-support machinery and other equipment to preserve the organs and remove them before they spoil. Surgeons have only a few critical hours before kidneys, livers and other body parts suffer damage that renders them unusable.
Dr. Lewis Goldfrank, the director of emergency medicine at Bellevue, said the ambulance project could spark an "amazing transformation" by substantially increasing the pool of donors. The system would be one of the first of its kind in the U.S., although similar ambulances have operated successfully in parts of Europe, he said.
breitbartWonder if they got ideas from these guys?
Body-Parts Cutter Convicted By Judge After Bench Trial
JAY STREET — A guilty verdict was handed down Monday for another defendant in the infamous body-parts case. Christopher Aldorasi, one of the “cutters” who carved up corpses as part of an elaborate enterprise to sell off body parts for millions of dollars, was found guilty of 20 of the 22 counts charged.
...
Unaware of their origins, doctors used the body parts in disk replacements, knee operations, dental implants and other surgical procedures across the United States and in Canada. The body of Masterpiece Theatre host Alistair Cooke was one of the corpses illegally carved up and plundered for tissues and/or organs in the gruesome scheme.
“This case has brought to light the need for new laws criminalizing misconduct in the funeral-home industry, as well as the tissue-donation industry,” said Hynes. “It also highlights the need for a felony reckless-endangerment charge that applies to actions demonstrating a depraved indifference to human life. In this case, such a crime would have been charged against the defendants for allowing diseased, or otherwise tainted, tissue to be cleared for transplant into thousands of patients.”
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
