Canadian Transplant waiting list frustrations.

Transplant waiting lists in most countries are 'silting up,' due to the exponentially increasing number of people on dialysis and the stagnant number of organ donations, which has been frozen at about the same level for the past decade. The only countries that don't face this problem are those with rational organ procurement plans, such as Austria, Belgium, and Spain which presumptively take all organs for transplant from every medically suitable corpse unless the person has registered an objection with the health authorities in advance; or such as Iran and the Philippines which permit people to buy a kidney for donation from a young, healthy person who wants the money more than a supernummary kidney. Even a small step, such as the government paying relatives for donating the organs of a deceased family member for enough money to pay for the funeral, or at the very least, denying relatives the legal right which they now have to override the expressed and recorded wishes of the deceased to donate his organs, would help enormously.

Canada, for all its self-congratulatory image of itself as a more communitarian, caring nation than others, has the lowest organ donation rate of any industrialized country. This means that the average wait for a kidney in Canada is now 8 years and rising, in contrast to less than half that time for most areas of the United States. Several factors make the situation even worse in Canada than the low donation rate requires. First, too few hospitals, especially in rural areas, have the necessary life support machines to keep the heart and lungs of a brain dead person functioning so that a medically usable kideny can be retrieved from it. Many donated organs go to waste because of this. Second, while other countries have long since decided to permit paired donations, in which family members whose blood types don't match can pair with matching blood type members of other families, so that matching kidneys can be traded from one family to another, the Canadian Medical Association is still not sure, in its infinite arrogance, whether it finds this ethical or not. They have been officially studying whether they will permit this life saving procedure now for the last ten years, but because they enjoy playing God so much, they have not yet reached a consensus to permit the peasants to save their lives by this means. Also, hospital transplant coordinators in Canada do not approve even of altruistic donations from emotionally non-related donors, since they choose to set their own mere suspicions that such donations are really organ purchases above the right of their dialysis patients to live.

The only thing to do is to try to get these foolish restrictions changed by arousing the outrage of the public. A few years ago there was a man who had found an altruistic donor in India who was willing to donate a kidney to him, since the person needing one was a famous hero of the struggle of Ethopian and Sudanese Jews a generation ago against the oppression of their governments. When his hospital turned down this life-saving option, saying that in their opinion it would be unethical, the patient went public and made a gigantic fuss about how unfair and unreasonable this was. What should happen, but a few WEEKS later, despite the usual 8 year wait for a kidney, "a perfect match" showed up for this patient in the Quebec cadaver transplant supply, and voila, all that disturbing publicity was gone and the hospital could breathe a sigh of relief. Wasn't that lucky?