Organ Donors Harvested For Profit - Australia Adopts Opt Out Model

[Brocke]

Scary stuff especially when you consider that a doctor that certifies brain death and approves organ donation for a donor that has opted out can always claim that they were unaware of the donors opt out choice.


Parliamentary committee to examine move to automatic organ donation

    * By Grant McArthur
    * From: Herald Sun
    * February 14, 2011 12:00AM

VICTORIANS could automatically become organ donors under a review to boost the state's dire organ donation rates.

A move towards "presumed consent" - where all Victorians become potential organ donors unless they register a formal objection - will be one of the options examined by a parliamentary committee, the Herald-Sun reports.

Currently only about one in 10 Victorian adults are registered organ donors - and many of those never have their final wishes fulfilled because grieving families frequently block organs going to the 1700 people on Australia's transplant waiting lists.

The opt-out system is one of several donation proposals to be included in a year-long review by a new parliamentary committee, which Health Minister David Davis hopes will save hundreds of lives.

"It is a critical issue to lift Victoria's rates of organ donation," he said.

"These policies can't be imposed on a community - it has to be about a community reaching a consensus on these matters."

Under terms of reference adopted this week, the eight-member Legal and Social Committee will also assess national and international donation evidence, the operation of existing systems and disclosure arrangements.

Figures from the Australian Donation website show approximately 1700 Australians are still waiting for organ donations.

Last year, only 309 donors gave organs which saved 931 recipients...

Read more: http://www.news.com.au/national/auto-organ-donors/story-e6frfkx0-1226005487593#ixzz1DxeDXagB



Donors not truly 'dead' when organs removed
Julia Medew
October 20, 2008

MOST organ donors in Australia are not truly dead when their organs are taken and often transplant procedures do not conform with the law, a leading Melbourne doctor has argued.

However, some experts have labelled the claims misguided and irresponsible and fear the debate will alarm organ donors and the wider community.

Associate Professor James Tibballs, a pediatric intensive care specialist at the Royal Children's Hospital, has called for a review of organ donation guidelines to ensure donors know that their organs can be taken when they are dying and not yet dead.

In a controversial article, published in the Journal of Law and Medicine this month, Dr Tibballs said clinical practice clashed with the law, which says organs can be taken from a donor when they have either irreversible cessation of all functions of their brain or irreversible cessation of blood circulation.

Dr Tibballs said clinical guidelines commonly used to diagnose brain death could not prove irreversible cessation of all brain function, and that the concept of brain death introduced into Australian law in 1977 was a "convenient fiction" that had allowed the development of organ transplantation.

Dr Tibballs also argued that when organs were taken after cardiac death (defined as the absence of blood circulation) it was usually done when the heart failed to restart itself for two minutes, not when proven "irreversible cessation" of its function had occurred.

This two-minute time limit was set partly because there is a limited time for organs to remain viable when someone is dying, he said.

Furthermore, Dr Tibballs said some interventions to ensure the viability of organs could actually harm or cause the death of the donor.

"The question of when is it permissible to retrieve organs is now phrased not in terms of whether death is present or not, but rather 'how dead is enough'," he said.

Despite donors being told by government organisations that they will be "brain dead" when their organs are taken, Dr Tibballs said donors were usually very close to death with no chance of survival during organ procurement.

He said he was not suggesting some patients could be brought back to live meaningful lives when their organs were taken, but rather wanted donors to know exactly what could happen to them so that they could give informed consent.

To improve the certainty of brain death diagnosis for organ donation, Dr Tibballs also called for a test of blood flow to the brain, which is currently optional and available in most hospitals, to be made compulsory.

He said the definition of death had previously troubled doctors, and that it was disturbing that some of these doctors were involved in the certification of death for the purposes of organ donation.

"It could be troubling for the public to realise that doctors looking out for organ donors are also the ones formulating guidelines on how to declare death for organ transplantation," he said.

"For this reason, there should be members of the community and people with legal backgrounds on the committee that create these clinical guidelines used to declare someone dead."

Dr Tibballs' argument comes three months after Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who had a heart valve transplant from a donor, announced a $136 million plan to increase organ transplantation, including the creation of a national donation authority and more organ transplant doctors.

But some intensive care specialists have branded Dr Tibballs' comments irresponsible because, they say, he is debating a technical medical point that could cause organ donation rates to plummet if the debate is misunderstood by the public.

"This could be very damaging to public confidence of brain death diagnosis, because a lot of people might say, 'we don't believe in this any more,' and as a consequence, people might die on waiting lists," said Associate Professor Bill Silvester, medical director of LifeGift, and senior intensive care specialist at the Austin Hospital.

Professor Geoffrey Dobb, chair of the Australian and New Zealand Intensive Care Society's committee on organ and tissue donation, said the committee had already rejected Dr Tibballs' call for a mandatory blood flow test to diagnose brain death, because current guidelines had been 100% accurate.

He said Australians could have absolute confidence that if they were diagnosed as brain dead - whether or not it was for organ donation - they would be dead.

"I strongly emphasise that this (Associate Professor Tibballs') view is an extreme minority point of view," Professor Dobb said.

"We know that every organ donor potentially saves or greatly enhances the lives of up to six other people, so even the loss of a single donor or someone who wished to be a donor is a major loss to the community as a whole."

But the clinical director of the Northern Hospital's Critical Care Department, Dr Graeme Duke, said Dr Tibballs had identified ambiguities in the organ donation process that needed to be fixed.

He said guidelines for organ donation should be revised to eliminate legal risks and ensure informed consent from donors.

more: http://www.theage.com.au/national/donors-not-truly-dead-when-organs-removed-20081019-53zo.html

[Satyagraha]

This is "presumed consent" and it's on the globalists/eugenicists agenda....

In the US, we have Cass Sunstein pushing for this...

Obama Regulation Czar Advocated Removing People’s Organs Without Explicit Consent
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/53534
Friday, September 04, 2009
By Matt Cover

(CNSNews.com) – Cass Sunstein, President Barack Obama’s nominee to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), has advocated a policy under which the government would “presume” someone has consented to having his or her organs removed for transplantation into someone else when they die unless that person has explicitly indicated that his or her organs should not be taken.
 
Under such a policy, hospitals would harvest organs from people who never gave permission for this to be done. 
 
Outlined in the 2008 book “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness,” Sunstein and co-author Richard H. Thaler argued that the main reason that more people do not donate their organs is because they are required to choose donation.
 
Sunstein and Thaler pointed out that doctors often must ask the deceased’s family members whether or not their dead relative would have wanted to donate his organs. These family members usually err on the side of caution and refuse to donate their loved one’s organs.
 
“The major obstacle to increasing [organ] donations is the need to get the consent of surviving family members,” said Sunstein and Thaler.
 
This problem could be remedied if governments changed the laws for organ donation, they said. Currently, unless a patient has explicitly chosen to be an organ donor, either on his driver’s license or with a donor card, the doctors assume that the person did not want to donate and therefore do not harvest his organs. Thaler and Sunstein called this “explicit consent.”
 
They argued that this could be remedied if government turned the law around and assumed that, unless people explicitly choose not to, then they want to donate their organs – a doctrine they call “presumed consent.” ... (continued)
 

And, since Cass Sunstein isn't particularly original (just a handy repeater in the mockingbird chain, and a dutiful puppet responder to orders...) we can see where he got his ideas about 'presumed consent'. But this isn't an Israeli idea (just refer to Chinese execution/organ extraction vans), and it's not American, not Australian - this is brought to humanity by the global governance crowd. The eugenicists love recycling body parts... especially when they can pick who dies:

========================================================

Implementing Presumed Consent for Organ Donation in Israel:
Public, Religious and Ethical Issues
http://www.ima.org.il/imaj/ar07nov-2.pdf

Ori Scott1* and Eyal Jacobson MD PhD ^1,2
1 Rappaport Faculty of Medicine, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel
2 Department of Family Medicine, Clalit Health Services, Haifa and Western Galilee District, Israel

Excerpted from the Report:

Current Israeli policy regarding cadaver organ donation

The constant organ shortage has raised a debate on the harvesting
policy of cadaver organs. In many countries, such as the U.S,
Great Britain, Canada and Australia, procurement of an organ
requires explicit consent of the donor prior to his or her death
[5].

This policy, known as the “expressed consent” or “opting-in”
system, is also customary in Israel [3]. According to this policy,
if a person wishes to donate his organs upon death, he must
specify as such by signing a donor card. Ethically, this policy
relies on the assumption that “express or explicit consent is always
prospective informed consent” [6].

In other words, a person who has registered as a donor is fully informed regarding organ
donation and all its aspects and is therefore allowed to give his
or her consent to this procedure. This clear, active consent is
derived from the full autonomy a person has over his body [7].
However, the fact that a person has “opted in” is not sufficient
for organ procurement to take place. The agreement of the next
of kin is also needed. Refusal of the deceased person’s family
will thus prevent the donation, even if the person has signed a
donor card during his or her life [2,7].

According to the Israeli National Center for Transplantation,
only 4% of the Israeli population has signed an organ donor
card (known as an “Adi” card). As for the families, less than 50%
of them are willing to donate their relatives’ organs [3]. These
refusal rates of families are similar to the data reported in the
U.S. [5].

In contrast to countries in which the expressed consent policy
is anchored in legislation, in Israel the situation is completely
different. The law relating to the organ donation issue is the Law
of Anatomy and Pathology. Section 6 of that law states that a
doctor is allowed to operate on a body and use any part of it in
order to save life. This is subject to one condition: namely, three
doctors qualified for this task must sign a document declaring
that the operation is indeed being performed for the purpose of
saving a life. The law states that, by definition, cornea, kidney
and skin transplantations are also considered life-saving procedures.
The law does not require the approval of either the donor
or the family. However, there is the obligation to notify the family
before the operation takes place [8]. Clearly, not only does the
law ignore the question of expressed consent, it also leaves the
individual with no option of objecting to the harvesting of his or
her organs upon death.

An attempt to implement the above law was made at the
Soroka Medical Center in Beer Sheva in 1993, when the organs of
a deceased individual were taken before his family’s permission
had been given. This event led to a major crisis in the delicate
relationship between doctors and the public; it also caused a
sharp decrease in the rate of donor card signing that year [9].
For that reason, organ procurement in Israel de facto is conducted
according to the expressed consent policy.

What is presumed consent?

The presumed consent policy has proved
to be an effective manner of organ procurement

One of the strategies conceived to increase the number of available
organs is the presumed consent doctrine. This policy is
based on the assumption that “everyone, as a matter of course,
would agree to have her or his organs harvested upon death”
[1].

Hence, a qualified doctor or a clerk can determine that the
organs of a person who died in a hospital can be taken for the
purpose of transplantation or research [7]. Despite the above,
an option is granted to any person to object to the removal
of his/her organs, whereby the individual’s name is added to a
national “opt-out” registry. In this manner, a well-documented
pool of donor-objectors is created and maintained by the responsible
authority [2,7].

Procurement coordinators are obliged to check this registry when
facing a potential deceased donor in the hospital [2].

A person who had not opted out in advance
is considered upon death as a donor, and for that reason the
doctor has no obligation to receive family authorization for the
procurement process [1,10].

Implementing the presumed consent doctrine in
different countries
The policy of presumed consent can be implemented either
stringently or leniently. In the former (the stringent manner), the
doctor is granted two discretionary options: the first is the power
to provide the consent for organ donation of every deceased
person who has not “opted-out” formally in advance. The second
is the ability to procure the organs despite an objection of the
donor’s next of kin. In the lenient manner, in the absence of any
documentation the default option would still be to procure the
deceased’s organs (this is in complete contradiction to informed
consent). Nevertheless, in contradiction to the stringent interpretation,
here the donor’s family does have the right to participate
in the process and to prevent the donation [2,7].
Currently, the European countries that have adopted the
Presumed Consent policy are Austria, Belgium, Finland, France,
Italy, Norway, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. Countries that act
according to the Expressed Consent policy are Australia, Canada,
Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Israel, The Netherlands, Great Britain
and the U.S. Among those countries that have embraced the
Presumed Consent policy, Austria is the only one in which
the policy is implemented in its stringent sense; in the othercountries mentioned above the lenient interpretation was applied
[2].
In recent years, attempts have been made to evaluate the
efficiency of the presumed consent policy in organ procurement.
In general, it was found that cadaveric organ donation rates were
25–30% higher in presumed consent countries [5].

In a comparative study conducted among six European countries in 1990,
organ transplantation rates were significantly higher in Belgium,
France and Austria which operate under the opting-out system,
as compared to Great Britain, Germany and The Netherlands that
operate under a system of opting-in. In Belgium for instance, an
increase of 140% in the number of available organs was reported
that year, following its transition from expressed to presumed
consent [11].

Another example of the influence of presumed
consent is seen in two transplantation centers in Belgium – one
in Leuven and the other in Antwerp. Leuven shifted to presumed
consent as soon as the law was passed in Belgium, and within
3 years the donation rates in that center climbed from 15 to 40
donors per million people. In contrast, Antwerp, which did not
change its procuring policy, showed no change in donation rates
[12]. More examples can be found in Spain and Italy [2,4,7].

There are several ways in which presumed consent laws can
generate higher donation rates. The first, and most obvious, is
that these laws allow for the next of kin’s wishes to be ignored
during the procurement process.
However, this explanation can only be true for Austria, where the policy is
implemented in the stringent sense. This is clearly not the case for other countries.

Another way in which presumed consent laws may be influential
is by functioning as a “signaling device to the population at
large and next of kin in particular” [2]. The existence of a presumed
consent law shifts the question that the donors and their
families face. Instead of asking families if they have a reason to
believe that the deceased would have agreed to donate, they
are asked whether they think the deceased would have objected to
the donation.

Moreover, with regard to public opinion, presumed
consent laws and changing the default from “No” to “Yes” actually
reflect a social norm concerning the expected course of action,
although the right to refuse the donation still exists [2]. This last
assumption regarding the social norm has been proven correct;
in contrast to the U.S and Great Britain where about 40–50% of
the families refuse the donation of their beloved ones’ organs,
in France the rate of family refusal is about 30% and in Spain as
low as 20% [5,13].

An international survey of transplantation professionals
showed that 75% of the responders supported presumed consent
legislation and 39% acknowledged this kind of legislation as the
most efficient means of increasing organ donation rates, thus
placing it first among all other methods proposed in the survey
[5].

(Read the full report at the source link).
------------------------------------------------------

Two points:
1. You can be sure Cass Sunstein is using this report as his 'guide'.
2. You can also be sure that Palestinians' organs have been removed under 'presumed consent'.



[/quote]

[freedom_commonsense]

Same thing was suggested here. Amazingly, there were idiots among the commenting public who agreed with it. "You don't need your organs after you're dead." "Selfish person not allowing someone else to live" etc. As for the "shortage" in organs, well we've already talked about manufactured illnesses and the crap in our food\water here on this forum.