By Jim Warren Editor & Publisher One of the more fascinating stories in the short history of transplantation came to a close this month with the news of the death of Jeff Getty. For those of you with short memories, Getty was an AIDS patient and activist who made history in 1995 when he received [Sign in to read the full article...]
A Los Angeles Times investigation published October 22nd charged that the United Network for Organ Sharing often fails to detect or decisively fix problems at derelict hospitals — even when patients are dying at excessive rates. When the agency does act, the article claims, it routinely keeps findings of its investigations secret, leaving patients and [Sign in to read the full article...]
The federal government is moving aggressively to create the first national banking system for umbilical cord blood, which contains the same potentially lifesaving stem cells as bone marrow but with a distinct advantage: The donor and recipient do not have to share the same group of genes essential to getting a transplant to take. As [Sign in to read the full article...]
When 71-year-old Ardell Lien of Caledonia, Minn., sailed into San Diego last week, he entered history as the first heart and kidney transplant recipient to have sailed solo around the world, completing a 17 ½-month voyage that covered 31,310 nautical miles. Lien had suffered from congestive heart failure for 15 years before he was hospitalized [Sign in to read the full article...]
A finding by University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine researchers about how immune cells “decide” to become active or inactive may have applications in fighting cancerous tumors, autoimmune diseases, and organ transplant rejection. Gary A. Koretzky, MD, PhD, professor of pathology and laboratory medicine and director of the Signal Transduction Program at Penn’s Abramson Family [Sign in to read the full article...]