Ethics expert advocates payment for organ donors

doi:10.1136/bmj.333.7575.937-a

BMJ 2006;333:937 (4 November), doi:10.1136/bmj.333.7575.937-a

News roundup

Ethics expert advocates payment for organ donors

Quebec David Spurgeon

Ethical and philosophical arguments against the sale of organs for transplantation are difficult to sustain when scrutinised closely, says a University of Toronto professor of public health and surgery in an article entitled “The case for a regulated system of living kidney sales” (Nature Clinical Practice Nephrology 2006;2:600-1).

Abdallah Daar, director of ethics and policy for the McLaughlin Centre for Molecular Medicine and co-director of the Canadian Program on Genomics and Global Health, says he and colleagues in the International Forum for Transplant Ethics do not argue that organ sales are always acceptable or that the market should be unfettered: “Our claim is that none of the familiar arguments against organ selling work, and this allows for the possibility that better arguments may be found.”

“In the US 90 000 patients are on the waiting list of whom 6000 die every year; in cities, there is a . . . [Full text of this article]

Add to CiteULike CiteULike Add to Complore Complore Add to Connotea Connotea Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us Add to Digg Digg Add to Reddit Reddit Add to StumbleUpon StumbleUpon Add to Technorati Technorati What's this?