dbd33

My daughter works in a trauma unit. They have young, fit, brain dead people in there all the time (notably victims of snow mobile accidents, which rather puts me off that pastime). These are ideal donors but few organs are harvested. Obviously the hospital can't try to persuade relatives to give up the organs but the issue is raised. My understanding is that the stumbling block is the need to keep the dead person's body going until the harvesting team arrives, families prefer to have a moment of death, to be there when the life support machines are unplugged. Because people can't bear the thought that the mechanics of their technically dead child will go on at someone else's convenience, other people, the potential organ recipients, die.

Anyone is welcome to any of my bits, for whatever purpose.

Colsgirl

I said no when they phoned me up and asked. i said to the woman I spoke to, how can I give consent to you using my organs when you say Brits are banned from giving blood because of the high CJD risk. She couldn't answer that.

Caitilin

oops! Thanks fledermaus, I seem to have missed it first read through. My bad!

JAJ

The risk of CJD is accepted by medical professionals as extremely low, around 1 case per million population per year. Despite all the press coverage, very few (<200) variant CJD cases have ever been confirmed.

Canada's ban isn't based on nationality (residence instead), covers all of Western Europe, and stems from little more than scaremongering based on flimsy evidence. (similar to the so-called "millennium bug").