Organ Donations

At 8:25 Thursday morning, Dr. Peter Schulam extracted a healthy kidney from a 60-year-old woman, slipped it into a bowl of sterile ice and wheeled it into the operating room next door. The donor, Nancy Seruto, a San Dimas mother, had never met the recipient, a 67-year-old retired flight attendant from Santa Ana. Less than two hours later, Seruto's husband was on the same operating table at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. Another stranger, a 53-year-old Chatsworth mother of two, was giving him a kidney.

A transplant surgeon accused of illegally hastening the death of a prospective organ donor acted properly when he ordered sizable doses of pain and anxiety medication for the comatose man, the physician's attorney suggested in court Thursday. Gravely ill, Ruben Navarro "was going to die shortly, whether in minutes or in hours," said attorney M. Gerald Schwartzbach as he asked a question of a witness. "In that situation, you err on the side of ensuring that he's pain-free."

It was to be the final medical procedure for Ruben Navarro, an altruistic end to the life of a critically ill 26-year-old who doctors said had no chance to recover. Staffers at Sierra Vista Regional Medical Center in San Luis Obispo were to disconnect him from the machine pumping oxygen into his lungs. After his heart stopped, transplant surgeons were to remove his organs so they could be used to save the lives of others. But in the late night quiet of an operating room Feb.

Prison inmates in South Carolina could get up to six months shaved off their sentences if they donated a kidney or their bone marrow, under a proposed bill before the state Senate. "We have a lot of people dying as they wait for organs, so I thought about the prison population," said state Sen. Ralph Anderson, the bill's main sponsor. "I believe we have to do something to motivate them. If they get some good time off, if they get out early, that's motivation."

Under pressure to tighten oversight of the nation's transplant centers, federal health officials unveiled strict new standards Thursday that could force dozens of organ programs to give up precious federal funding or have it pulled from them. The rules come after a series of scandals in California in the last 18 months have embarrassed regulators and exposed serious gaps in the monitoring of the nation's transplant system. The U.S.

To allay fears that surgeons might try to retrieve the organs of dying patients prematurely, the federal contractor that oversees organ transplantation approved standards Friday to protect the growing number of donors who have no hope of recovery but who are not officially brain-dead.

A man whose family agreed to donate his organs for transplant upon his death was wrongly declared brain-dead by two doctors at a Fresno hospital, records and interviews show. Only after the man's 26-year-old daughter and a nurse became suspicious was a third doctor, a neurosurgeon, brought in. He determined that John Foster, 47, was not brain-dead, a condition that would have cleared the way for his organs to be removed, records of the Feb. 21 incident show.

A Dutch reality show that claims to be trying to draw attention to a shortage of organ donors said Tuesday that it would go ahead with a program in which a terminally ill woman will choose a contestant to receive one of her kidneys. The program, "Big Donor Show," has been attacked as unethical and tasteless. One member of the Dutch parliament suggested the government should block Friday's broadcast.

A Dutch reality TV show in which a supposedly dying woman had to pick one of three contestants to whom she would donate a kidney was revealed Friday as an elaborate hoax. The show, which the broadcaster had said aimed to focus attention on a shortage of donor organs in the Netherlands, was condemned by Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende before transmission and sparked controversy worldwide.

When the nurse asked Erica Rangel-Baez if she would be willing to donate her son's organs, Rangel-Baez prayed to know what to do. Just days earlier, 9-year-old Frankie Hernandez was perfectly healthy, an outstanding baseball player. But on a Sunday afternoon in 2005, he walked into his family's house in Arleta, clutching his head and complaining of a headache so fierce he needed to go to the hospital. Halfway to the hospital, he stopped breathing.