By Marc Beuttler
The difficulty with organ transplantation is that as soon as an organ is removed from the body, the individual cells that compose it begin to die. This limits how far organs can be transported and which organs can be transplanted, resulting in less overall organs available locally to help people in dire need. However, a new technique that has so far only been tried in rat livers shows …

By Caroline Song
Medical Xpress, a web-based medical and health news service has recently published an article titled “Stem cell transplantation for severe sclerosis associated with long-term survival” on June 24, 2014. The article reviews a study published in the June 25, 2014 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, or JAMA. The study conducted by Jacob M. van Laar, M.D., Ph.D., of the University Medical Center Utrecht, Utrecht, …

By Noushaba T.Rashid

Would you trust someone with your limbs and face?Just donating your kidney or liver is something of the past. Now you could donate your hands or your face. How? Why? Becoming an organ donor may mean more than just donating your internal organs. Checking the box on your driver’s license just got a little tricky.
With the onset of modern technology in transplants, the government is gearing up to …

By Marc Beuttler
When people sign up to become organ donors (usually while obtaining a new driver’s license) they also agree to donate bones, cartilage and other tissues that can be transplanted much like organs. While most organ donors don’t realize that they have signed up to be bone and cartilage donors or that it’s even possible to donate these tissues, for many who suffer serious burns, cancer, and other conditions, …

Since the first successful surgery in 2006, face transplant procedures have become more standardized and better understood. In fact, they are now “currently feasible” for children; this new possibility has spurred an ethical dialogue among Canadian physicians. The procedure has the potential to radically transform the lives of children who suffer from devastating facial deformities and for whom no other reconstructive alternatives exist. “Facial transplantation offers a chance  – in …

By Marc Beuttler

In a presentation to the UN Human Rights Council, the outgoing UN Special Rapporteur on trafficking in persons, Joy Ngozi Ezeilo, highlighted the lack of adequate knowledge of human trafficking for removal of organs. Human trafficking is a vast and dirty industry that generates more than $51 billion dollars annually. This large profit is perhaps due to the increased scope of trafficking in women, men, boys and girls, …

By Abrigul Lutfalieva

A kidney racket has been busted in Visakhapatnam and the Director of the hospital has been arrested in connection with the case. The Odisha Police arrested Seven Hills Hospitals Director Dr. N.Prabhakar Babu after his hospital allegedly carried out a kidney transplant without following rules. However, the police were not able to take the accused into custody as he had fallen sick.
Meanwhile,the hospital representatives said that they had …

By Noushaba T. Rashid

Elena Cattaneo and Gilberto Corbellini are working hard to protect patients from fraudulent stem-cell therapies. Recently in Italy, clinical standards were threatened and the healthcare system and patients wanted to fight for evidence based medicine.
The Stamina Foundation is a private organization, which was founded in Italy in 2009. They claim that stem cells collected from human bone marrow can be transformed into neural cells. Davide Vannoni, the …

By Chiru Murage

Increasing medical advances have an unforeseen consequence: the supply for organ donations is increasingly outrunning the demand. In this article, Wesley J. Smith discusses a new and contested idea that would hypothetically increase the number of organ donations.
This idea has surfaced in Clinical Ethics (201 3 Volume 8 Number I) in which it is proposed that awake and conscious ICU patients are asked to harvest organs, as opposed …

By Noushaba T. Rashid

Human organs don’t smell that bad in Ukraine Militia from Slavyansk found hundreds of National Guard soldiers’ corpses during a night reconnaissance operation according to many social media outlets recently. These soldiers appeared to have their stomachs ripped open and had their organs removed. In addition this horrifying discovery, many living in this region of high conflict have seen armored and special vehicles, ambulances and armored cash …