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Tag: organ donation

  • Northwell is launching first adult pancreas transplant program | Long Island Business News

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    THE BLUEPRINT:

    • Northwell approved to start ‘s first adult pancreas .

    • Program adds to Northwell Transplant Institute’s existing kidney, heart, liver and lung services.

    • Launch addresses the needs of 800+ patients and 2,500 kidney-pancreas patients.

    • Expands options, potentially reducing or eliminating the need for insulin.

    The New York State Department of Health has given the green light to to   launch Long Island’s first adult pancreas transplant program.

    The Northwell Transplant Institute at (NSUH) were recently visited by DOH officials for a site visit – the final hurdle before the program becomes accessible to patients in New York and southern Connecticut.

    The institute is now one of 59 centers across the country that provides heart, kidney, liver, lung and pancreas programs under one roof, according to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. It also provides care for children in need of a new heart or kidney.

    “Northwell now consistently performs more than 200 kidney transplants a year with excellent outcomes,” Dr.  Nabil Dagher, senior vice president and director of Northwell Transplant Institute, said in a news release about the pancreas transplant program.

    “The goal has always been to bring pancreas transplantation to Long Island and marry these similar disciplines,” Dagher said. “We’ve attracted some of the best nephrologists and surgeons in the world, true experts in kidney disease and diabetes. Adding pancreas transplantation to the Northwell Transplant Institute’s already robust programs will further strengthen the care we deliver to all patients.”

    The program is launching at a time when 120,000 Americans need an organ transplant, including more than 800 awaiting a pancreas transplant and another roughly 2,500 seeking a combination kidney/pancreas transplant, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing.

    NSUH began performing adult kidney transplants in 2007 and launched a pediatric kidney transplant program at Cohen Children’s Medical Center in New Hyde Park in 2017. Dr. Niraj Desai joined Northwell in 2024 to oversee kidney transplantation and lead the launch of the pancreas program. Desai previously served as director of the kidney and pancreas transplant programs at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore.

    “The mission is to bring greater access to people in need, whether that’s through making more organs available for transplantation – which we’ve been working toward – or creating new pathways to receive a life-saving transplant,” Desai said in the news release. “We’ve pushed to expand the age and criteria for . I’m excited that we can open pancreas transplant to a new, underserved population.”

    The pancreas transplant program expands treatment options for patients with advanced diabetes. Often performed in conjunction with a kidney transplant, the procedure can restore the body’s natural ability to regulate blood sugar and reduce or eliminate the need for insulin.

    “Kidney transplantation has risen in recent years, driven by greater awareness of its benefits and an increased availability of donated organs,” Dr. Vinay Nair, medical director of Northwell’s Center for Kidney and Pancreas Transplantation, said in the news release.

    “Unlike kidney transplantation, pancreas transplantation has remained stagnant, largely due to a lack of public knowledge and an insufficient number of centers offering the procedure,” Nair added. “Our new program seeks to mitigate these challenges by both enhancing awareness and establishing local availability for pancreas transplantation.”


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    Adina Genn

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  • To find living donors for kidney transplants, a pilot program turns to social networks

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    HARRISBURG, Pa. — Fernando Moreno has been on dialysis for about two years, enduring an “unbearable” wait for a new kidney to save his life. His limited world of social contacts has meant that his hopes have hinged on inching up the national waiting list for a transplant.

    That was until earlier this year, when the Philadelphia hospital where he receives treatment connected him with a promising pilot project that has paired him with “angel advocates” — Good Samaritan strangers scattered around the country who leverage their own social media contacts to share his story.

    So far, the Great Social Experiment, as it was named by its founder, Los Angeles filmmaker David Krissman, hasn’t found the Vineland, New Jersey, truck driver a living kidney donor. But there are encouraging early signs the angel advocate approach is working, and there’s no question it has given Moreno new optimism.

    “This process is great,” said Moreno, 50, whose own father died of kidney failure at 65. “I’m just hoping there will be somebody out there that’s willing to take a chance.”

    Moreno is part of a pilot program with 15 patients that began in May at three Pennsylvania hospitals. It’s testing whether motivated, volunteer strangers can help improve the chances of finding a life-saving match for a new kidney — particularly for people with limited social networks.

    “We know how this has always been done, and we’re trying to put that on steroids and really get them the help that they need,” Krissman said. “Most patients are too sick to do this on their own — many don’t have the skills to do it on their own.”

    The Gift of Life Donor Program, which serves as the organ procurement network for eastern Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey and Delaware, is supporting the pilot program with a grant of more than $100,000 from its foundation.

    So far, two of the five patients in the program through Temple University Hospital have found kidney donors, and one is preparing for surgery, according to Ryan Ihlenfeldt, the hospital’s director of clinical transplant services. One of the five patients at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center in Harrisburg has also undergone a transplant.

    The approach Krissman has developed is something new, said Richard Hasz Jr., Gift of Life’s chief executive, and may help identify the types of messages that attract and motivate potential live kidney donors.

    “This is the first of its kind that I’m aware of,” Hasz said. “That’s why, I think, the foundation was so interested in doing it — studying it and hopefully publishing it — so we can create that blueprint, if you will, for the future.”

    Gift of Life agreed to fund a broader test and helped Krissman identify five patients each at Temple, UPMC-Harrisburg and Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia.

    Hasz said the pilot program’s approach combines social media outreach with Krissman’s storytelling talents and aggressive efforts to mobilize the patients’ own connections.

    “We know that patients who are waiting don’t always have the energy or the resources to do this themselves,” Hasz said.

    There have been other ways for patients to set up “ microsites ” where they can tell their stories and seek a donor match. But the pilot program currently underway in Pennsylvania aims to connect patients with a wide universe of potential donors and produce videos and other ways to spread their message.

    Krissman’s bout with an illness about two decades ago inspired him to tackle the sticky challenge of increasing live kidney donations. He was debilitated for more than a year before medication helped him recover, explaining, “It gave me my life back. And I never forgot what it’s like to be chronically sick.”

    After producing a podcast on kidney transplantation, Krissman recruited four patients through Facebook who were waiting for kidneys. He was able to help two of them. A second effort, a pilot program with three patients in North Carolina that ended last year, helped match all three with living donors.

    Becca Brown, director of transplant services at UPMC-Harrisburg, thinks it might be a game changer.

    “There’s potential for this to really snowball,” Brown said. “I’m anxious to see what happens and if we can roll it out to other patients.”

    Some 90,000 people in the United States are on a list for a kidney transplant, and most of the roughly 28,000 kidneys that were transplanted last year came from deceased donors. Living kidney donations are hard to come by — about 6,400 were transplanted last year. Thousands die each year waiting for an organ transplant in the United States.

    Living kidney donations can be a better match, reducing the risk of organ rejection. They allow for surgery to be planned for a time that is optimal for the donor, the recipient and the transplant team. And, the foundation says, living donor kidneys, on average, last longer than kidneys from deceased donors.

    The National Kidney Foundation says living donors must be at least 18 years old, although some transplant centers set the minimum age at 21. Potential donors get screened for health problems and can be ruled out if they have uncontrolled high blood pressure, diabetes or cancer, or if they are smokers.

    Many living donors make “directed donations” to specify who will get their kidney. Nondirected donations are made anonymously to a patient.

    Francis Beaumier, a 38-year-old information technology worker from Green Bay, Wisconsin, came into contact with the angel advocate program after being a double living donor — a kidney and part of his liver.

    He sees the program as “a great little way for everyone to make a small difference.”

    Another angel advocate, Holly Armstrong, was also a living donor. She hopes her efforts will plant a seed.

    “Some people might just keep scrolling,” said Armstrong, who lives in Lake Wiley, South Carolina. “But there might be someone like me, where they stop scrolling and say, ‘This boy needs a kidney.’”

    A study released last year found that people who volunteer to donate a kidney are at a lower risk of death from the operation than doctors had previously thought. Tracking 30 years of living kidney donations, researchers found fewer than 1 in every 10,000 donors died within three months of the surgery. Newer and safer surgical techniques were credited for dropping the risk from 3 deaths per 10,000 living donors.

    Temple serves a large cohort of poorer patients who can have difficulty understanding health issues and who suffer from uncontrolled hypertension and diabetes, Ihlenfeldt, who works there, said.

    “What David’s trying to do is coalesce a network of support around these patients who are sharing the story for them,” Ihlenfeldt said.

    At a kickoff event in a Harrisburg meeting room for kidney patient Ahmad Collins, a couple dozen friends and family listened with rapt attention as Krissman went over the game plan, answering questions and describing the transplant process.

    Collins, a 50-year-old city government worker and former Penn State linebacker, has needed 10 hours a night of dialysis since a medical procedure left him with damaged kidneys late last year.

    His mind was on the strangers who might decide to pitch in.

    “They can be a superhero, so to speak,” Collins said. “They can have the opportunity to save somebody’s life, and not too many times in life do you have that opportunity.”

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  • We Want to Hear From You on Organ Donation

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    Take our short survey to help identify barriers, inform policy, and ensure our community has a fair chance at life-saving transplants.

    There’s a sobering inequity at the heart of organ donation in America: A federal report released earlier this year revealed that in 2024, Black Americans made up more than a quarter of the national transplant list, yet they are far less likely to receive the kidneys, livers, hearts, and other organs they need to survive. It also found that Black folks accounted for just 13% of organ donors.

    Word In Black’s research division wants to know why. We’ve launched a short survey to better understand the barriers to donation — whether mistrust, misinformation, or access — and we want to hear directly from you.

    Your Voice Matters

    Your responses will help fill a crucial gap in our national understanding and make sure every voice counts. Together we can:

    • Elevate awareness and influence how organ-donation campaigns are designed
    • Inform policy changes to improve access, outreach, and trust
    • Spark community conversations that can ultimately save lives

    As a thank you, when you complete the survey, you’ll also be entered into a drawing to win one of twenty prizes.

    Your views and experiences matter. Please join us in this meaningful work.

    👉🏽 Take the survey today – https://theatlantavoice.com/organ-donation-and-transplantation-research/

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    The Atlanta Voice Staff

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  • HHS moves to shut down major organ donation group in latest steps to reform nation’s transplant system

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    As part of its efforts to strengthen the country’s organ transplant system, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services says it is moving to decertify a major organ procurement organization – essentially shutting it down and removing it from the nation’s network of organ donation groups.HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called the move a “clear warning” to other groups that also work to coordinate organ donations.HHS officials are moving to close the Life Alliance Organ Recovery Agency, a division of the University of Miami Health System, after an investigation uncovered unsafe practices, staffing shortages and paperwork errors, Kennedy said Thursday.“We are acting because of years of documented Patient Safety Data failures and repeated violations of federal requirements, and we intend this decision to serve as a clear warning,” he said.The Life Alliance Organ Recovery Agency is one of 55 organ procurement organizations that are federally designated nonprofits responsible for managing the recovery of organs for transplantation in the United States, in which they focus on specific geographic regions and work with hospitals.The Association of Organ Procurement Organizations (AOPO) said in a statement Thursday that the Life Alliance Organ Recovery Agency serves 7 million people across six counties in South Florida and the Commonwealth of the Bahamas.“Through this process, AOPO pledges that we and our members will keep saving lives nationwide. We will continue to support the team at Life Alliance to ensure South Florida organ donors, transplant patients and their families have access to organ donation and transplantation services,” AOPO President Jeff Trageser said in a statement, while thanking federal health officials for recognizing the importance of organ donation.“Because there is only one OPO per donation service area, it’s critical for CMS/HHS to manage the situation carefully and work with Life Alliance, hospitals & the wider donation community to ensure there are no lapses in donation during this process so lives can continue being saved,” he added in an email.There is a process by which the Life Alliance Organ Recovery Agency could appeal the decertification. Neither the organization nor the University of Miami Health System immediately responded to CNN’s request for comment.“The Life Alliance Organ Recovery Agency based in Miami, Florida, has a long record of deficiencies directly tied to patient harm,” Kennedy said Thursday.“Staffing shortfalls alone may have caused – it was a 65% staffing shortage consistently across the years – and may have caused as many as eight missed organ recoveries each week, roughly one life lost each day,” he said. “Our goal is clear: Every American must trust the nation’s organ procurement system. We will not stop until that goal is met.”Kennedy also plans to direct organ procurement organizations to appoint full-time patient safety officers to monitor safety practices, report incidents and ensure that corrective actions are implemented, among other responsibilities.“This officer will be responsible for coordinating responses across clinical operational teams, ensure compliance with federal priorities and take corrective action whenever patients are at risk,” Thomas Engels, administrator of the federal Health Resources and Services Administration, said Thursday.These moves are part of an ongoing initiative to reform the organ transplant system after a federal investigation earlier this year found what Kennedy called “horrifying” problems, including medical teams beginning the process of harvesting organs before patients were dead.‘We are sending a tough message’Each year in the United States, more than 28,000 donated organs go unused and are discarded because of inefficiencies in the system, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz said Thursday.“We are sending a tough message to all the other nonprofit organ procurement agencies, organizations, so they know we’re serious,” Oz said. “We want them to know there’s a new sheriff in town, and we’re coming for them if they don’t take care of the American people.”Organ transplant programs are certified under the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, and they must meet certain requirements to be approved by Medicare.“We’re going to crack down on noncompliance with Medicare requirements,” Oz said, adding that more action could be coming.“We’re going to be tougher than ever before, because if we lose trust in the organ transplantation system of this country, tens of thousands of people are going to die yearly whose lives could be saved,” he said.Public trust of the organ donation system is essential since the system relies on people to volunteer to donate their organs when they die. Most sign up when they’re getting their driver’s license.As of 2022, about 170 million people in the U.S. have signed up to donate their organs, but there is always more demand than there are organs available.Last year, there were more than 48,000 transplants in the U.S., but more than 103,000 people were on waiting lists. About 13 people in the United States die every day waiting for a transplant, according to the Health Resources and Services Administration.Investigations into organ procurementIn July, HHS announced its intention to fix the nation’s organ donation system. The agency directed the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network, the public-private partnership that runs the complex donation system in the United States, to improve safeguards and monitoring at the national level and to find ways to strengthen safety protocols and transparency.An investigation by the Health Resources and Services Administration – detailed in a hearing in July and a memo from March – found problems with dozens of transplant cases involving incomplete donations, when an organization started the process to take someone’s organs but for, some reason, the donation never happened.The cases were managed by a procurement organization that handles donations in Kentucky and parts of Ohio and West Virginia; formerly called Kentucky Organ Donor Affiliates, it has merged with another group and is now called Network for Hope.Network for Hope said on its website in July, “We are equally committed to addressing the recent guidance from the HRSA and we are already evaluating whether any updates to our current practices are needed.”Of the 351 cases in the federal investigation, more than 100 had “concerning features, including 73 patients with neurological signs incompatible with organ donation,” HHS said in a July news release.The investigation was launched after one Kentucky case came to light during a congressional hearing last year. In that case, 33-year-old TJ Hoover woke up in the operating room to find people shaving his chest, bathing his body in surgical solution and talking about harvesting his organs. Staffers had been concerned that he wasn’t brain-dead, but the concerns were initially ignored, according to the federal investigation.Staff told CNN that the procedure to take Hoover’s organs stopped after a surgeon saw his reaction to stimuli.The federal investigation found “concerning” issues in multiple cases, including failures to follow professional best practices, to respect family wishes, to collaborate with a patient’s primary medical team and to recognize neurological function, suggesting “organizational dysfunction and poor quality and safety assurance culture” in the Kentucky-area organization, according to a federal report.Since the federal review, the Health Resources and Services Administration said, it has received reports of “similar patterns” of high-risk procurement practices at other organizations.

    As part of its efforts to strengthen the country’s organ transplant system, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services says it is moving to decertify a major organ procurement organization – essentially shutting it down and removing it from the nation’s network of organ donation groups.

    HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called the move a “clear warning” to other groups that also work to coordinate organ donations.

    HHS officials are moving to close the Life Alliance Organ Recovery Agency, a division of the University of Miami Health System, after an investigation uncovered unsafe practices, staffing shortages and paperwork errors, Kennedy said Thursday.

    “We are acting because of years of documented Patient Safety Data failures and repeated violations of federal requirements, and we intend this decision to serve as a clear warning,” he said.

    The Life Alliance Organ Recovery Agency is one of 55 organ procurement organizations that are federally designated nonprofits responsible for managing the recovery of organs for transplantation in the United States, in which they focus on specific geographic regions and work with hospitals.

    The Association of Organ Procurement Organizations (AOPO) said in a statement Thursday that the Life Alliance Organ Recovery Agency serves 7 million people across six counties in South Florida and the Commonwealth of the Bahamas.

    “Through this process, AOPO pledges that we and our members will keep saving lives nationwide. We will continue to support the team at Life Alliance to ensure South Florida organ donors, transplant patients and their families have access to organ donation and transplantation services,” AOPO President Jeff Trageser said in a statement, while thanking federal health officials for recognizing the importance of organ donation.

    “Because there is only one OPO per donation service area, it’s critical for CMS/HHS to manage the situation carefully and work with Life Alliance, hospitals & the wider donation community to ensure there are no lapses in donation during this process so lives can continue being saved,” he added in an email.

    There is a process by which the Life Alliance Organ Recovery Agency could appeal the decertification. Neither the organization nor the University of Miami Health System immediately responded to CNN’s request for comment.

    “The Life Alliance Organ Recovery Agency based in Miami, Florida, has a long record of deficiencies directly tied to patient harm,” Kennedy said Thursday.

    “Staffing shortfalls alone may have caused – it was a 65% staffing shortage consistently across the years – and may have caused as many as eight missed organ recoveries each week, roughly one life lost each day,” he said. “Our goal is clear: Every American must trust the nation’s organ procurement system. We will not stop until that goal is met.”

    Kennedy also plans to direct organ procurement organizations to appoint full-time patient safety officers to monitor safety practices, report incidents and ensure that corrective actions are implemented, among other responsibilities.

    “This officer will be responsible for coordinating responses across clinical operational teams, ensure compliance with federal priorities and take corrective action whenever patients are at risk,” Thomas Engels, administrator of the federal Health Resources and Services Administration, said Thursday.

    These moves are part of an ongoing initiative to reform the organ transplant system after a federal investigation earlier this year found what Kennedy called “horrifying” problems, including medical teams beginning the process of harvesting organs before patients were dead.

    ‘We are sending a tough message’

    Each year in the United States, more than 28,000 donated organs go unused and are discarded because of inefficiencies in the system, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz said Thursday.

    “We are sending a tough message to all the other nonprofit organ procurement agencies, organizations, so they know we’re serious,” Oz said. “We want them to know there’s a new sheriff in town, and we’re coming for them if they don’t take care of the American people.”

    Organ transplant programs are certified under the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, and they must meet certain requirements to be approved by Medicare.

    “We’re going to crack down on noncompliance with Medicare requirements,” Oz said, adding that more action could be coming.

    “We’re going to be tougher than ever before, because if we lose trust in the organ transplantation system of this country, tens of thousands of people are going to die yearly whose lives could be saved,” he said.

    Public trust of the organ donation system is essential since the system relies on people to volunteer to donate their organs when they die. Most sign up when they’re getting their driver’s license.

    As of 2022, about 170 million people in the U.S. have signed up to donate their organs, but there is always more demand than there are organs available.

    Last year, there were more than 48,000 transplants in the U.S., but more than 103,000 people were on waiting lists. About 13 people in the United States die every day waiting for a transplant, according to the Health Resources and Services Administration.

    Investigations into organ procurement

    In July, HHS announced its intention to fix the nation’s organ donation system. The agency directed the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network, the public-private partnership that runs the complex donation system in the United States, to improve safeguards and monitoring at the national level and to find ways to strengthen safety protocols and transparency.

    An investigation by the Health Resources and Services Administration – detailed in a hearing in July and a memo from March – found problems with dozens of transplant cases involving incomplete donations, when an organization started the process to take someone’s organs but for, some reason, the donation never happened.

    The cases were managed by a procurement organization that handles donations in Kentucky and parts of Ohio and West Virginia; formerly called Kentucky Organ Donor Affiliates, it has merged with another group and is now called Network for Hope.

    Network for Hope said on its website in July, “We are equally committed to addressing the recent guidance from the HRSA and we are already evaluating whether any updates to our current practices are needed.”

    Of the 351 cases in the federal investigation, more than 100 had “concerning features, including 73 patients with neurological signs incompatible with organ donation,” HHS said in a July news release.

    The investigation was launched after one Kentucky case came to light during a congressional hearing last year. In that case, 33-year-old TJ Hoover woke up in the operating room to find people shaving his chest, bathing his body in surgical solution and talking about harvesting his organs. Staffers had been concerned that he wasn’t brain-dead, but the concerns were initially ignored, according to the federal investigation.

    Staff told CNN that the procedure to take Hoover’s organs stopped after a surgeon saw his reaction to stimuli.

    The federal investigation found “concerning” issues in multiple cases, including failures to follow professional best practices, to respect family wishes, to collaborate with a patient’s primary medical team and to recognize neurological function, suggesting “organizational dysfunction and poor quality and safety assurance culture” in the Kentucky-area organization, according to a federal report.

    Since the federal review, the Health Resources and Services Administration said, it has received reports of “similar patterns” of high-risk procurement practices at other organizations.

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  • Trump administration to close Miami organ donation group it calls ‘failing’

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    WASHINGTON — The Trump administration moved Thursday to shut down a Miami organ donation group, calling it “failing” because of underperformance, unsafe practices and paperwork errors.

    The Life Alliance Organ Recovery Agency is one of 55 organ procurement organizations, or OPOs, nonprofit agencies around the country that coordinate the recovery of organs from deceased donors and help match them to patients on the nation’s transplant waiting list.

    The administration cited an investigation that found a 2024 case where an unspecified mistake led a surgeon to decline a donated heart for a patient awaiting surgery.

    In a news briefing, Dr. Mehmet Oz, who heads the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said problems included would-be donations that went unrecovered, sending some donated organs to the wrong place and a lack of staff.

    Life Alliance, a division of the University of Miami Health System, can appeal the decision. If it is shut down, it would mark the first time the federal government has decertified an OPO.

    Life Alliance didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

    More than 100,000 Americans are on the transplant list and thousands die waiting because there aren’t enough donations to go around. Last year there were more than 48,000 transplants, a record, the vast majority from deceased donors.

    Changes to the transplant system have been underway for years to increase donations, reduce waste of potentially usable organs and address other concerns. They include some new safeguards after complaints last year that a different OPO didn’t stop donation preparations quickly enough when some patients showed signs of life, prompting some people to opt out of donor registries. Organ donation can proceed only after a hospital has declared someone dead — and by law, OPOs cannot be involved in that decision.

    On Thursday, Oz sought to reassure would-be donors.

    “Congress has thoughtfully and aggressively pursued some horrifying stories that have chilled some Americans’ enthusiasm for donating organs. We are here today to tell you this system is safe. It’s rigorously being addressed,” he said, adding later, “I want to applaud the OPOs that are doing a great job because most are.”

    —-

    The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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  • New public dashboard aims to track the fairness of the allocation of organ donations – WTOP News

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    In an effort to make sure organ transplant matches are fair, the Department of Health and Human Services has launched a new public online tracking tool.

    In an effort to make sure organ transplant matches are fair, the Department of Health and Human Services has launched a new public online tracking tool.

    “Since the beginning of transplantation, there has always been a shortage of organs, not enough to go around for all the people who could benefit,” said Dr. Thomas Fishbein, executive director of the MedStar Georgetown Transplant Institute.

    He said the newly launched dashboard from the HHS is an effort to track whether organs are being fairly assigned.

    “There’s always a balance between, in a sense, the equity or the fairness of how the organ gets offered to someone, and … the speed and how efficiently the organ can be accepted by somebody, so that it doesn’t go to waste because it took too long,” Fishbein said.

    He said the tool was implemented because the HHS said they were finding organs were being given to patients out of the normal order.

    The aim is to crack down on “Allocation Out Of Sequence” events, or AOOS. This often happens when an organ isn’t a fit for patients at the top of the list and it goes out of sequence to whomever can accept it.

    “They might have gotten offered to 500 or 1,000 patients, nobody had accepted that organ, and so they would go out of sequence and say, ‘whoever will accept it can have the organ.’ Now, there will be a renewed focus on making sure that it is done in some orderly sequence,” Fishbein said.

    At MedStar Georgetown, he said, they have updated their organ transplant operations to presort through their list of patients waiting for transplants.

    “And annotate, essentially, the list so that we know which patients have been disadvantaged by the allocation system and for whom we need to keep a special eye out for special offers of organs that might not have been accepted by people higher up on the list,” Fishbein said.

    He said that while this change will track how the programs are finding patients for available organs, he’s proud of how MedStar Georgetown and other programs are continuing to ethically allocate organs for transplants.

    “We have a very robust, very mature program and system, and in the vast majority of programs across the country, people are working hard and ethically to benefit patients like those on our list,” he said. “Overall, the organ transplant system is good, ethical and these changes that are occurring are relatively minor tweaks in the system.”

    WTOP’s Grace Newton contributed to this story.

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    © 2025 WTOP. All Rights Reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.

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    Valerie Bonk

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  • In a First, a Human Breathed Using an Implanted Pig Lung

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    The tantalizing potential of pig-to-human transplantation, or xenotransplantation, has reached another frontier. For the first time ever, scientists have transplanted a genetically edited pig lung into a living human body.

    Researchers in China reported the medical feat in a study published Monday in Nature Medicine. The gene-edited left lung survived for nine days inside a person declared to be brain dead. More work has to be done to ensure the long-term viability of these organs, the researchers admitted.

    The dire need for more organs

    Despite recent strides, there simply aren’t enough living or deceased human donors to meet the urgent need for organs. More than 100,000 Americans are on the waiting list for a donated organ, and over 5,000 die annually without having received one. That’s why scientists have been hopeful about the promise of xenotransplantation for decades.

    It’s only recently, however, that this approach has seemed within reach, thanks to gene-editing advances that are allowing scientists to create pigs more compatible with human biology. One of these vital modifications removes a pig’s ability to produce the sugar alpha gal in their muscles—a sugar that humans don’t make.

    In recent years, scientists have transplanted kidneys, livers, and hearts from gene-edited pigs into a human body. But this new research appears to show the first recorded instance of a gene-edited lung transplant.

    A novel but flawed accomplishment

    As with most xenotransplantation studies in humans so far, the research involved a person who was declared brain dead (according to the researchers, this status was verified by four separate assessments). They transplanted a pig’s left lung into the 39-year-old recipient, who was also given immunosuppressant therapy. Then they tracked how the new lung functioned as well as the host’s immune response to it.

    The lung wasn’t immediately rejected by the body, the researchers found, and it was both viable and functioning for at least nine days. But within a day, they spotted lung damage that was possibly caused by the sudden return of blood flow. On days three and six, they observed signs of rejection from the recipient’s antibodies that actively damaged the lung. And though there was some recovery afterward, the researchers decided to end the experiment at day nine.

    Important as this research is, the findings also show just how far these transplants are from becoming a clinical reality.

    “Although this study demonstrates the feasibility of pig-to-human lung xenotransplantation, substantial challenges relating to organ rejection and infection remain,” the researchers wrote.

    Xenotransplantation in general is still in its infancy, and a bona fide breakthrough hasn’t quite yet happened. Doctors have started to transplant gene-edited kidneys and hearts into living recipients on an experimental basis (these recipients are usually terminally ill and have few other options available). But to date, none of these patients have lasted more than a few months with the new organ. In April, for instance, 53-year-old Towana Looney relinquished her pig kidney four months post-transplant after it began to fail (she has since returned to regular dialysis).

    That said, scientists still are learning lots from these early studies and failures. These lessons will hopefully narrow down the exact mix and amount of gene edits needed to make a pig organ human enough, as well as the precise regimen of drugs that will keep these organs safe from rejection. And the technology is certainly moving forward.

    Earlier this February, for example, the Food and Drug Administration granted two companies— eGenesis and United Therapeutics—permission to move forward with phase I clinical trials of xenotransplantation for people with kidney failure. In April, eGenesis received further FDA clearance for a separate phase I trial of liver xenotransplantation.

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    Ed Cara

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  • Raising awareness for National Donate Life Month

    Raising awareness for National Donate Life Month

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    ALBANY, N.Y. (NEWS10) — It’s National Donate Life Month, a time meant to encourage people to sign up for organ donation. Lia Nissan of Saratoga teamed up with Donate Life New York on Thursday to support the mission.

    The company said anyone who signs up to become an organ donor through April 30 will receive discounted services. They are hoping the promotion brings more awareness to the need for donors.

    “It’s not really a topic you think about on a day-to-day basis,” Donate Life NYS Exec. Dir. Aisha Tator said. “This puts the information out there so New Yorkers understand we have this crisis, and there is something we can do to help.”

    According to the state, more than 7.5 million New Yorkers have joined the Donate Life registry.

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    Courtney Ward

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  • A Temple Hospital worker needed a kidney transplant. When the call finally came, his colleague performed it

    A Temple Hospital worker needed a kidney transplant. When the call finally came, his colleague performed it

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    Julian Harmon assists doctors, nurses and patients in the operating rooms where organ transplants are performed at Temple University Hospital.

    Harmon also has lived with kidney disease for nearly a decade and was put on the kidney transplant waiting list in 2019. Of the more than 90,000 Americans waiting for a kidney, only 28,144 received one in 2023.

    But every day at work, Harmon remained hopeful as he cleaned operating rooms, took specimens to labs and transported patients in and out of surgeries. 

    “I would even meet people who were going to get a kidney transplant,” said Harmon, who works as a perioperative services assistant.

    Instead of making him feel jealous or resentful, Harmon said talking to others as he wheeled them into operating rooms for transplant surgery helped him maintain hope. “I knew I wasn’t alone,” he said. “I always knew I would get the surgery done.”

    On Jan. 6, 2023, Harmon received a call at work that a kidney was available for him. Within hours, Harmon was in one of the operating rooms where he spends his days, receiving a life-saving transplant performed by Dr. Kenneth Chavin, director of Temple Health’s Abdominal Organ Transplant Program, whose locker happens to sit right next to Harmon’s.

    “Now we’ve become friends,” Chavin said. “He’s maintaining his kidney beautifully.”

    Earlier in April, Harmon and Chavin threw out the first pitch at a Phillies game. Their appearance was a way to celebrate and raise awareness about kidney donation during National Donate Life Month.

    Kidney disease is the fastest-growing noncommunicable disease in the United States and kills more people each year than breast or prostate cancer. About 37 million Americans are living with kidney disease, including 808,000 with kidney failure. 

    Black Americans are more than four times as likely to develop kidney failure than white Americans. Hispanic and Native Americans are more than twice as likely. 

    The shortage of available kidneys means that the majority of people living with kidney failure – which has no cure – are on dialysis while they hope for a kidney transplant. More than 556,000 people are on kidney dialysis, according to the American Kidney Fund.

    Harmon eventually ended up on dialysis after being diagnosed in 2015 with IgA nephropathy, a disease in which IgA protein builds up in and damages the filtering part of the kidney. For about four years, Harmon had to do peritoneal dialysis at home for 12 hours each night. The process which required him to attach a catheter surgically placed in his abdomen to a machine that pumped cleansing fluid into his stomach and waste products from his blood.

    “I would come home, make myself dinner, wash up and hook myself onto the machine,” Harmon said. “Some nights would be good, and some nights I would end up lying the wrong way and all sorts of alarms would go off.”

    His mother and his tight group of friends kept his spirits up. “I knew I had people in my corner,” Harmon said.

    “I used to work through the week and by the weekend I would be exhausted,” Harmon said. Often he had to rest in bed most of the weekend to regain the strength to return to work the following week.

    His mother worried about him, Harmon said. “To see me from there to now – she’s just ecstatic.

    “When you’re doing dialysis, there are a lot of things you have to sacrifice,” such as a social life, said Harmon, who now has a girlfriend.

    Receiving a kidney transplant is “transformational,” Chavin said, noting that it allows people to “go back to normal activity.”

    With more research and knowledge about the immune system and medication, one-year survival rates after a kidney transplant are now about 90%, Chavin said. In the early days of transplant surgery, they were closer to 50%.

    Someone who donates a kidney and then needs a transplant for whatever reason goes to the “top of the list,” Chavin said, “so the system has this safety net.”

    Donating organs not only impacts the people who receive them, but also “their legacy, what they do in life,” Chavin said.

    By sharing his story, Harmon said he hopes more people will consider organ donation. 

    “There are a lot of people in my situation,” Harmon said, “A lot of people who deserve that second chance at life.”


    People can register to be an organ donor when renewing their driver’s licenses or state IDs. They also can register online.

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    Courtenay Harris Bond

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  • A 16-year-old is arrested in the fatal shooting of a Rocky Mountain College student-athlete

    A 16-year-old is arrested in the fatal shooting of a Rocky Mountain College student-athlete

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    A freshman football player at Rocky Mountain College was fatally shot over the weekend and police in Billings, Montana have arrested a 16-year-old suspect

    ByThe Associated Press

    October 30, 2023, 5:58 PM

    BILLINGS, Mont. — A freshman player at Rocky Mountain College was fatally shot over the weekend and police in Billings, Montana have arrested a 16-year-old suspect, officials said.

    Chandler Wyatt Stalcup, 18, of Crystal River, Florida, was shot early Saturday. He remained on life support until Monday when his organs were harvested for donation, the Yellowstone County Coroner’s Office told KULR-TV.

    Police were responding to a report of a gun being discharged during a fight at a house party just before 3 a.m. Saturday when they received a call about the shooting near campus, police Lt. Matt Lennick said. The suspect was arrested about six hours later and was being held in juvenile detention. Investigators recommended a deliberate homicide charge.

    Stalcup had gone to the house party to pick someone up early Saturday when there was an exchange between Stalcup and the suspect, Lennick said.

    Both parties left in separate vehicles and the confrontation continued until Stalcup was shot in the road near campus, Lennick said.

    Stalcup was a defensive lineman who appeared in one game this season, according to the school’s website.

    Rocky Mountain College, an NAIA school in the Frontier Conference, postponed all athletic events, including a men’s basketball game in Great Falls on Saturday morning, two soccer matches Saturday afternoon and a volleyball match Saturday night. The team had a bye on Saturday.

    About 200 students and staff gathered for a prayer service on Saturday night.

    Messages left with the sports information department and the college’s media relations office on Monday were not immediately returned.

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  • How a family’s choice to donate a body for pig kidney research could help change transplants

    How a family’s choice to donate a body for pig kidney research could help change transplants

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    NEW YORK — Mary Miller-Duffy was dazed and grieving. Her brother suddenly collapsed and days later was brain-dead. Now she faced a tough question: Would she donate his body for research?

    That’s how the body of Maurice “Mo” Miller started its journey to a sunny corner of NYU Langone Health’s intensive care unit — and became part of the quest to one day ease the nation’s transplant shortage with organs from animals.

    “He always wanted to help people,” said Miller-Duffy, who struggled with the choice but is proud of her brother’s last act. “This tragic death, this fast short death — something good has come out of it.”

    Surgeons replaced Miller’s kidneys with one from a genetically modified pig on July 14. Then doctors and nurses cared for the deceased man like they would a living patient while anxiously ticking off the days.

    Remarkably, over a month later the new organ is performing all the bodily functions of a healthy kidney — the longest a pig kidney has ever worked in a person. Now the countdown is on to see if the kidney can last into September, a second month.

    The Associated Press got an inside look at the challenges of experiments with the dead that may help bring animal-to-human transplants closer to reality.

    ___

    Getting an organ transplant today is a long shot. More than 100,000 people are on the national waiting list, most who need a kidney. Thousands die waiting. Thousands more who could benefit aren’t even added to the list.

    “I had seven cardiac arrests before I even was sick enough” to qualify for a new heart, said Dr. Robert Montgomery, chief of NYU Langone’s transplant institute. He’s a kidney transplant surgeon — and was lucky enough to get his own heart transplant in 2018.

    Filling the gap, he’s convinced, will require using animal organs.

    After decades of failed attempts, now pigs genetically modified so their organs are more humanlike are renewing interest in so-called xenotransplantation. Last year, University of Maryland surgeons tried to save a dying man with a pig heart — and he survived for two months.

    Montgomery is getting more practice in the dead before taking a chance with a living patient. A handful of prior experiments at NYU and the University of Alabama at Birmingham have kept pig kidneys and hearts working in donated bodies for a few days to a week, avoiding the immediate rejection that doomed many earlier attempts.

    But the most common kind of organ rejection develops over a month. That pig heart in Maryland worked great for nearly 50 days until abruptly faltering. Watching how pig kidneys reach those timepoints in donated bodies could offer vital lessons — but how long could Montgomery expect a family to turn over their loved one?

    “I’m in awe of someone who can make a decision like that at, you know, one of the worst moments in their lives and really think about … humanity,” he said.

    ____

    In Newburgh, New York, an ambulance had raced Miller to the hospital after he collapsed, a mass in his brain. He never woke up from the biopsy, brain-dead at just 57. Next steps were up to his sister, his closest relative.

    Miller-Duffy asked about donating his organs but he didn’t qualify. That biopsy had found cancer.

    Only then did the organ agency broach whole-body donation. Miller-Duffy wasn’t familiar with that, but the goal of improving kidney transplants, “that kind of struck a chord.” Another brother had died of kidney disease as a toddler. Other relatives have kidney-damaging illnesses or even died on dialysis.

    Flipping through family photos, Miller-Duffy recalled how her brother would adopt animals and once took care of a terminally ill friend. Still, she had questions.

    In a video call, Montgomery explained the pig transplant to Miller-Duffy and her wife, Sue Duffy — and why it could make a difference. Montgomery’s compassion won them over.

    “His body is not being hurt, you know,” Duffy said. “It’s just an incubation for the study to be done.”

    ____

    The experiment served as a rehearsal for one day operating in a living patient. Montgomery finished removing Miller’s own kidneys as a helicopter headed for the hospital’s riverside landing pad. Drs. Jeffrey Stern and Adam Griesemer, fellow NYU surgeons, raced in kidneys they’d removed from a pig bred by Blacksburg, Virginia-based Revivicor.

    Sewing a pig kidney into a donated body isn’t much different than a regular transplant, Stern said. Post-surgery immune-suppressing drugs are standard, too.

    One twist: Tacked onto the pig’s kidney was its thymus, a gland that trains immune cells — and thus might help protect the organ.

    Lots of extra steps come before and after surgery.

    First, what pig to use: Some have up to 10 genetic changes but Montgomery is betting one is enough — removal of a single porcine gene that triggers an immediate immune attack.

    While the pigs are housed in a germ-free facility, researchers performed extra testing for any hidden infection. Everyone in the operating room must have certain vaccinations and undergo blood tests of their own.

    Surgery over, doctors wheeled Miller’s body into the same ICU room where five years earlier Montgomery had recovered from his heart transplant.

    Next came more intense testing than living patients could tolerate. Every week doctors biopsy the kidney, putting samples under the microscope to spot any hints of rejection. Blood is continually monitored, the spleen got a peek, and nurses keep close watch that the body is being properly maintained on the ventilator.

    The first few weeks, Griesemer checked lab test results and vital signs multiple times a day: “You’re like, OK, hopefully things are still good — but is this the day it starts to turn?”

    And they’re shipping biopsy samples to research partners across the country and as far away as France.

    “Our staff doesn’t sleep that much,” said Elaina Weldon, a nurse practitioner who oversees the transplant research. But with each passing week, “everybody is really now at the point of, what more can we do? How far can we push?”

    She knows firsthand the huge interest: NYU quizzed community groups and religious leaders before embarking on research with donated bodies that might have sounded “a little bit more on the sci-fi side of things.”

    Instead, many people wanted to know how soon studies in the living could start, something the Food and Drug Administration will have to decide. Dozens have written Montgomery, eager to participate.

    ___

    Montgomery regularly calls Miller-Duffy and her wife with updates, and invited them to NYU to meet the team. And as the study’s initial one-month deadline approached, he had another ask: It was going so well, could they keep her brother’s body for a second month?

    It meant further postponing plans for a memorial service but Miller-Duffy agreed. Her request: That she gets to be there when her brother is finally disconnected from the ventilator.

    Whatever happens next, the experiment has changed Sue Duffy’s outlook on organ donation.

    “Maybe I don’t need all my organs when I go to heaven,” she said. “Before I was a hard no. … Now I’m a hard yes.”

    ___

    The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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  • Pig kidney works in a donated body for over a month, a step toward animal-human transplants

    Pig kidney works in a donated body for over a month, a step toward animal-human transplants

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    NEW YORK — Surgeons transplanted a pig’s kidney into a brain-dead man and for over a month it’s worked normally — a critical step toward an operation the New York team hopes to eventually try in living patients.

    Scientists around the country are racing to learn how to use animal organs to save human lives, and bodies donated for research offer a remarkable rehearsal.

    The latest experiment announced Wednesday by NYU Langone Health marks the longest a pig kidney has functioned in a person, albeit a deceased one -– and it’s not over. Researchers are set to track the kidney’s performance for a second month.

    “Is this organ really going to work like a human organ? So far it’s looking like it is,” Dr. Robert Montgomery, director of NYU Langone’s transplant institute, told The Associated Press.

    “It looks even better than a human kidney,” Montgomery said on July 14 as he replaced a deceased man’s own kidneys with a single kidney from a genetically modified pig — and watched it immediately start producing urine.

    The possibility that pig kidneys might one day help ease a dire shortage of transplantable organs persuaded the family of Maurice “Mo” Miller from upstate New York to donate his body for the experiment. He’d died suddenly at 57 with a previously undiagnosed brain cancer, ruling out routine organ donation.

    “I struggled with it,” his sister, Mary Miller-Duffy, told the AP about her decision. But he liked helping others and “I think this is what my brother would want. So I offered my brother to them.”

    “He’s going to be in the medical books, and he will live on forever,” she added.

    Attempts at animal-to-human transplants, or xenotransplantation, have failed for decades as people’s immune systems attacked the foreign tissue. Now researchers are using pigs genetically modified so their organs better match human bodies.

    Last year with special permission from regulators, University of Maryland surgeons transplanted a gene-edited pig heart into a dying man who was out of other options. He survived only two months before the organ failed for reasons that aren’t fully understood but that offer lessons for future attempts.

    Next, rather than last-ditch efforts, the Food and Drug Administration is considering whether to allow some small but rigorous studies of pig heart or kidney transplants in volunteer patients.

    The NYU experiment is one of a string of developments aimed at speeding the start of such clinical trials. Also Wednesday, the University of Alabama at Birmingham reported another important success — a pair of pig kidneys worked normally inside another donated body for seven days.

    Kidneys don’t just make urine — they provide a wide range of jobs in the body. In the journal JAMA Surgery, UAB transplant surgeon Dr. Jayme Locke reported lab tests documenting the gene-modified pig organs’ performance. She said the weeklong experiment demonstrates they can “provide life-sustaining kidney function.”

    These kinds of experiments are critical to answer remaining questions “in a setting where we’re not putting someone’s life in jeopardy,” said Montgomery, the NYU kidney transplant surgeon who also received his own heart transplant — and is acutely aware of the need for a new source of organs.

    More than 100,000 patients are on the nation’s transplant list and thousands die each year waiting.

    Maryland’s Dr. Muhammad Mohiuddin cautions that it’s not clear how closely a deceased body will mimic a live patient’s reactions to a pig organ. But he said the research educates the public about xenotransplantation so “people will not be shocked” when it’s time to try again in the living.

    Previously, NYU and a team at the University of Alabama at Birmingham had tested pig kidney transplants in deceased recipients for just two or three days. An NYU team also had transplanted pig hearts into donated bodies for three days of intense testing.

    But how do pig organs react to a more common human immune attack that takes about a month to form? Only longer testing might tell.

    The surgery itself isn’t that different from thousands he’s performed “but somewhere in the back of your mind is the enormity of what you’re doing … recognizing that this could have a huge impact on the future of transplantation,” Montgomery said.

    The operation took careful timing. Early that morning Drs. Adam Griesemer and Jeffrey Stern flew hundreds of miles to a facility where Virginia-based Revivicor Inc. houses genetically modified pigs — and retrieved kidneys lacking a gene that would trigger immediate destruction by the human immune system.

    As they raced back to NYU, Montgomery was removing both kidneys from the donated body so there’d be no doubt if the soon-to-arrive pig version was working. One pig kidney was transplanted, the other stored for comparison when the experiment ends.

    One other trick: Surgeons attached the pig’s thymus to the transplanted kidney in hopes that the gland, which helps train immune cells, would increase human tolerance of the organ. Otherwise, the team is relying on standard immune-suppressing drugs used by today’s transplant patients.

    “You’re always nervous,” Griesemer said. To see it so rapidly kickstart, “there was a lot of thrill and lot of sense of relief.”

    How long should these experiments last? Alabama’s Locke said that’s not clear -– and among the ethical questions are how long a family is comfortable or whether it’s adding to their grief. Because maintaining a brain-dead person on a ventilator is difficult, it’s also dependent on how stable the donated body is.

    In her own experiment, the donated body was stable enough that if the study wasn’t required to end after a week, “I think we could have gone much longer, which I think offers great hope,” she said.

    ___

    AP video journalist Shelby Lum contributed to this report.

    ___

    The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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  • Marines, bonded by kidney donation, now head to Super Bowl

    Marines, bonded by kidney donation, now head to Super Bowl

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    PHILADELPHIA — Two former Marines bonded by a kidney donation and their love of are now headed to the Super Bowl.

    John Gladwell, a Kansas City resident and Chiefs fan, donated a kidney to Philadelphia Eagles backer Billy Welsh two years ago after Welsh, who lives in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, was diagnosed with polycystic kidney disease.

    The two men first met at a military base in the early 2000s and remained in touch through social media after they left the service. When Welsh made a post in 2019 asking if anyone was willing to become a donor, Gladwell responded and soon learned he was a 99% match. He eventually flew to Philadelphia, where the 10-hour surgical procedure was performed.

    “It meant the world to me. I was speechless. John Gladwell is my hero,” Welsh said Wednesday when the two men appeared on NBC’s Today show.

    Gladwell said he didn’t hesitate to make the donation because Welsh has a son who is a little older than his own grandson.

    “I wasn’t going to let his son grow up without his dad being there for everything,” Gladwell said.

    The all-expenses-paid Super Bowl trip was put together by Eagles President Don Smolenski and his Chiefs counterpart Mark Donovan. Smolenski said the story symbolizes the unifying aspects of the Marine Corps and the NFL. The team presidents spoke with the two men during a video call last Sunday, letting them know they would be flown to Arizona on Friday, put up in hotel rooms and have side-by-side seats for the big game.

    “The opportunity to bring these two guys together, their two teams playing on the biggest stage in sports, it’s very, very humbling and gratifying,” Smolenski told The Philadelphia Inquirer.

    Welsh said he was “speechless” when he got the news. Gladwell, meanwhile, thought he was getting a spam call when a Super Bowl Host Committee representative contacted him Sunday morning.

    “They’re like, ‘You’re going to the Super Bowl,’” Gladwell said, remembering the shock. “I’m like, ‘I am?’”

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  • Arizona dad seeking answers after son dies in state care

    Arizona dad seeking answers after son dies in state care

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    FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. — Richard Blodgett, a single father, was jailed on a drug charge when a worker from Arizona’s child welfare agency delivered the news: His son was brain dead and on life support — just days after being taken into state custody.

    Blodgett screamed, cried and screamed some more. Jakob was his only son, a “darn cute,” curious 9-year-old who loved remote control cars and video games.

    Blodgett is now struggling to understand how it happened.

    A medical examiner listed Jakob’s death in late December as natural with complications from diabetes, a condition he was diagnosed with as a toddler. Specifically, Type 1 diabetes, which means his body was unable to produce enough insulin to survive.

    Blodgett said he suspects the Arizona Department of Child Safety failed in its duty to protect his son, either by not monitoring his blood sugar levels or not ensuring that Jakob had enough insulin to prevent a serious, life-threatening complication known as ketoacidosis.

    “They couldn’t keep him alive for two weeks, two weeks,” the father told The Associated Press while on a recent furlough from jail. “That’s absolutely insane. That was my pride and joy. I’m lost. I’m completely lost. My family is completely lost.”

    The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office is investigating Jakob’s death. The office declined a request for an interview with Sheriff Paul Penzone, citing the ongoing investigation.

    The Department of Child Safety also declined to comment specifically on the case, citing confidentiality laws. But spokesperson Darren DaRonco said, in general, that foster parents are required to receive training from a medical provider before taking in a child with any medical condition.

    DaRonco did not respond to further inquiries, including whether Jakob’s insulin pump was removed and if the boy’s regular doctor was consulted about his care — questions raised by Blodgett and his mother, Cheryl Doenges. They said Jakob could not manage the insulin on his own.

    In the fiscal year that ended last June, about 26 children died while in the agency’s custody, including from overdoses, medical conditions, natural and still undetermined causes. In the previous fiscal year, that number was 14. The figures amount to a fatality rate of about 97 per 100,000 children during that period, the most recent for which data is available.

    That rate is higher than overall deaths of children in Arizona. Nationally, about 55 children died per 100,000 children in the general population of all causes in 2020 — similar to Arizona’s number.

    Karin Kline, director of child welfare initiatives at the Family Involvement Center in Phoenix, said the death of a child is a concern, especially if it happens under the custody of the state.

    “Rest assured, somebody is going to look into it if there’s an inkling that the death was a result of negligence or abuse,” she said.

    Jakob and his father had been living at a motel when Blodgett was arrested in December. Blodgett, who already had a drug case pending and has spent time in prison, said was operating a backhoe much of the day and pulled over at a gas station to take a nap. The report from the Show Low Police Department corroborated as much, but officers wrote that they suspected Blodgett nodded off as a result of drug use.

    Authorities ultimately found more than 4,000 fentanyl pills in Blodgett’s possession, according to the report. Blodgett was booked into jail in Holbrook and charged with one count of drug possession, Navajo County Superior Court documents show.

    Blodgett told the AP he had been using fentanyl for pain management after he dropped 300 pounds with weight loss surgery.

    “I wasn’t getting high. I wasn’t abusing them. I was using them to be able to work and provide for my son,” Blodgett said. “Unfortunately, they are illegal. I can’t get around that. But they were stronger than my meds, and they were working.”

    Jakob was alone in the motel room when an officer picked him up and alerted the Department of Child Safety, according to the police report. Blodgett said someone at the motel always checked on his son, whom he called as police confronted him.

    He told Jakob he got into trouble, and the boy asked if his father was going to be OK, Blodgett said. The two often traveled together in vast expanses of Arizona — taking selfies, stopping at gas stations to get snacks and playing with Nerf guns.

    “The last time I got to see my son, he was already dead,” Blodgett said.

    Doenges couldn’t make the trip to see Jakob at the hospital from Washington state where she lives because of bad weather. But she asked a friend in Arizona to sit with Jakob, pray with him and play music for him so he wasn’t alone — even if he didn’t know she was there.

    Furloughed from jail, Blodgett arranged for a ride to Phoenix, more than three hours away, to see his son unresponsive in a hospital bed. Hospital staff had placed a teddy bear next to the boy and a heart-shaped pendant — Blodgett kept one half and the other half will be cremated with Jakob, Doenges said.

    Blodgett took pictures, hugged and kissed his son and talked to him. The hospital had a memorial for Jakob on Dec. 26 — the day some of his organs were harvested and later donated with Blodgett’s blessing, along with a moment of silence.

    Before the year ended, Blodgett was back in jail.

    Doenges said her son will have to find a way to piece his life back together.

    “My suggestion to him is to live a really good life in memory of Jakob and do something positive,” she said. “He probably didn’t even hear me, he’s so full of grief.”

    ___

    Associated Press data journalist Camille Fassett in Seattle contributed to this report.

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  • Nurse becomes a living organ donor for her mom — twice | CNN

    Nurse becomes a living organ donor for her mom — twice | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Marzena Stasieluk needed a new kidney. She’d been diagnosed with kidney disease in 2015, and ultimately needed dialysis, a grueling process where a machine did the work her kidneys could no longer do.

    But in order for a kidney transplant to succeed, she needed a liver first. Stasieluk’s liver disease had been controlled for more than a decade, but it worsened during the Covid-19 pandemic. It wasn’t so bad that she would be prioritized for a liver from a deceased donor, her family said, but bad enough that a kidney transplant likely wouldn’t work.

    Marzena’s daughter, Jennifer Stasieluk, is a nurse who has cared for patients in the hardest of times, through Covid-19 and cancer. She was willing, even eager, to give her mother a kidney. They’d done all the scans and test, but it wasn’t going to work.

    Although they had the same blood type, her mother is among a subset of patients called “highly sensitized.” Marzena had a high number of antibodies against foreign tissues – a factor that increases the likelihood an organ will be rejected and makes it much harder to find a match.

    “She needed a new liver to do a kidney transplant. However, her liver by itself wasn’t sick enough,” recalls Jennifer, 29. “So, they kind of, like, threw their hands up and were just, kind of, like, ‘sorry.’ ”

    In January 2020, an appointment with Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, introduced a new idea: Doctors suggested Marzena get a portion of a liver from a living donor.

    Jennifer insisted she get tested. Despite her mother’s protests, she wouldn’t take no for an answer. And this time, the response was a good one.

    “I kicked her door open in the morning when I got that call that I was a match. I said ‘Mom, I’m a match, pack your bags, surgery’s in six weeks.’ We couldn’t believe I was a match,” Jennifer said.

    On June 25, 2021, Jennifer gave her mother a lobe of her liver. Jennifer spent five days recovering in the hospital, and Marzena spent 11. For living donors and recipients, the liver has the unique ability to regenerate in a matter of weeks, and recovery was successful for mother and daughter.

    But Marzena, affectionately known as a “professional grandma,” had to continue with dialysis, and was desperate for a normal life.

    “It was awful. You sit there three days a week for over three hours,” said Marzena, who lives in Illinois. “My kids and my grandkids are the whole world and that’s why I was fighting for so long. I don’t want them, the kids and my grandkids, to lose me.”

    After the liver transplant, Jennifer was prepared to donate a kidney to a stranger as part of a paired donation – a process in which living donor’s kidneys are swapped so recipients like Marzena receive a compatible organ.

    Jennifer went through another round of bloodwork and tests to prepare for kidney donation. But then came a surprise: Because of the effect Jennifer’s liver had on her mother’s immune system, she was now able to give her mother a kidney.

    “We never in a million years thought that I would be a direct match,” Jennifer said. “I was excited for it. I wasn’t nervous. I knew I was in good hands.

    “I gave her the bigger lobe of my liver on June 25, 2021. And then a year later, a kidney.”

    Jennifer Stasieluk, left, and her mother Marzena Stasieluk.

    Dr. Timucin Taner, division chair of transplant surgery at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, performed the liver transplant for the Stasieluks.

    He and his colleagues have been studying the effect of liver transplants on the immune system, including research into how a liver transplant before a heart transplant – not the typical order – can reduce organ rejection.

    Taner said the Stasieluks are the first case they’re aware of where a liver’s effect on a patient’s immune response allowed for a subsequent kidney transplant from the same donor. They’re planning to write a case report about the procedures.

    “She donated two organs a year apart to the same person,” Taner said of Jennifer. “So she saved her mom’s life twice.”

    Taner says organ donors, living or deceased, are heroes. There simply aren’t enough organs to provide for everyone who needs one.

    Across the country, nearly 106,000 people are on the national transplant waiting list according to the United Network for Organ Sharing. So far this year, nearly 40,000 transplants have been performed.

    “On average, typically about 25,000 people in the U.S. are waiting for a liver transplant on the waiting list,” Taner said. “And of those, every year we can only transplant up to about 9,000 of them because that’s only how many livers we have.

    Jennifer described working long, late shifts as a nurse helping patients and their families during the height of the pandemic. There were dark days when answers were few and hope was sometimes hard to come by.

    “Losing patients to Covid was devastating. I felt so helpless,” Jennifer said.

    But donating organs to her mother – twice – was empowering.

    “Just knowing that there is something I can do that is not hopeless … just having that power that I can actually do something and help her and save her life, it was amazing,” Jennifer said.

    This will be the first Christmas in about seven years when Marzena is feeling healthy. Jennifer said it’s more special than any holiday before.

    Marzena said her daughter’s gifts changed her life.

    “Today, I am grateful. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to say enough, thank you,” Marzena said, fighting back tears. “What do you say to a person that donated two organs, not just one?”

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  • HIV-positive heart donor’s family, recipient meet

    HIV-positive heart donor’s family, recipient meet

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    NEW YORK — Brittany Newton’s family grieved last spring when her life was cut short, at age 30, by a brain aneurysm. But they got to feel close to her again this week, listening to her heart beating in the chest of a thankful New York woman whose life was saved by an organ transplant.

    Miriam Nieves, 62, on Tuesday eagerly hugged Newton’s mother and sisters, who she met for the first time at Montefiore Medical Center, where the heart transplant was performed last April.

    “The only words that come this Thanksgiving for me is, I am so thankful and so grateful for science, for my family, for my God,” Nieves said. “But I can’t express enough that if it wasn’t for the donors, they are my angels, because they are the ones that allow me this second opportunity.”

    Newton’s mother, Bridgette Newton, carried a large photo of her daughter, a certified nursing assistant who had lived in Louisiana.

    “My child is still walking around,” she said. “And for that I will forever be grateful.”

    Nieves, a former public relations professional who now lives in New York City’s suburbs, beat a heroin addiction 30 years ago but was left HIV-positive.

    The married mother of three and grandmother of six started experiencing heart failure after problems with her kidneys.

    In order to find a match when the shortage of donors is acute, doctors at the hospital expanded their search to include HIV-positive donors. Enter Newton, an organ donor whose family only learned of her HIV status after her death.

    Doctors transplanted her heart and kidney into Nieves.

    Newton’s sisters, Breanne and Brianca Newton, used a stethoscope to listen to the beating heart. Breanne Newton said she wasn’t surprised when she heard Nieves say she felt more energetic since the transplant.

    “That was my sister. She had energy. She was a goer,” she said, adding, “We are very, very thankful. And it’s just a blessing.”

    Surgeons have been transplanting organs from HIV-positive donors to HIV-positive recipients for several years but doctors at Montefiore said this was the first such transplant of a heart.

    “I think it’s going to be done again because we’ve shown that it’s safe,” said Dr. Omar Saeed, a transplant cardiologist at Montefiore.

    “The reality is that there are more people who need hearts than there are hearts available,” said Dr. Vagish Hemmige, an infectious disease specialist at the facility. “The HIV heart transplant program enables people living with HIV to receive life-saving transplants from donors that otherwise wouldn’t be used.”

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  • 69 vs. 70: Bias Against Older Organ Donors May Be Costing Lives

    69 vs. 70: Bias Against Older Organ Donors May Be Costing Lives

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    By Cara Murez 

    HealthDay Reporter

    MONDAY, Nov. 21, 2022 (HealthDay News) — The difference between age 69 and age 70 is, of course, just a single year.

    Yet, organizations that receive organs for transplant patients are less likely to choose one from the older donor, a new study finds.

    American organ procurement organizations and transplant centers were about 5% less likely to select or accept an organ from 70-year-old donors than from those who died at 69.

    This is called left-digit bias, which unconsciously places value on the first digit in a number — 7 in 70, for example — and is linked to ageism, according to researchers from the University of Michigan and University of California, San Francisco.

    While previous research had found this bias in using donor kidneys, researchers wondered if it would happen if other organs were included.

    “Donated organs are a lifesaving resource, but there are many more people on the waiting list than there are available organs,” said co-author Dr. Clare Jacobson, a general surgery resident at University of Michigan Health, in Ann Arbor.

    “We were interested in looking at how we could make small changes to optimize our current supply of deceased donor organs, with the goal of both serving the patients on the waiting list and honoring the gift of life these donors are providing,” she said in a university news release.

    For the study, the researchers used data from the United Network for Organ Sharing, a nonprofit that manages the nation’s organ transplant system. That the centers were 5% less likely to choose an organ from a 70-year-old suggests that about 1 donor in 18 will be rejected altogether, Jacobson said.

    “This demonstrated bias is not limited to a single transplant center, [organ procurement organization] or even step in the transplant process, and is seen across organ types,” Jacobson said. “In our role as stewards of these gifted organs and for all patients waiting for a transplant, interventions must target every step in the transplantation process to overcome our prejudiced thinking.”

    That same left-digit bias was not significant in selecting organs when donors were age 59 compared to age 60, the researchers found. Jacobson said other factors such as weight, blood work and other health problems may get greater consideration when donors are younger.

    The findings were recently published in the American Journal of Surgery.

    More information

    Organdonor.gov has more on organ, eye and tissue donation.

     

    SOURCE: Michigan Medicine – University of Michigan, news release, Nov. 16, 2022

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