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 …

By Evangelia Lazaris

Jacquelyn Shaw is writing in response to Dr. Stephen Beed’s concerns about previous comments made on presumed consent and organ donation. She argues that the quality of brain death determination goes hand-in-hand with the quality of the tests used to confirm brain death. Though Beed supports the brain death tests that, since 2003, have been adopted across Canada, Shaw states that these tests are, in fact, unsafe and …

By Jake Stern

Scientists at the University of Missouri in Columbia have successfully implanted human stem cells into genetically modified pigs with compromised immune systems, paving the way for future advances in research using non-human animal subjects. In the past, stem cell research has been constrained by cell rejection, which is caused by the significant differences between the immune systems of the animal subjects (for example, mice) and human patients. However, …

By Marc Beuttler

The Obama administration has decided not to revoke an insurance coverage mandate for transplant recipients. The life-preserving medication these patients require can cost more than $2,000 a month, and if the proposal to relax insurance coverage for transplant recipients had been adopted, drug costs would have jumped for vulnerable populations.
Many people already cannot afford what they currently pay for life-preserving drugs. Since 2006, a federal guarantee requires all …

By Jake Stern

Over the past two weeks in Nepal, fifteen organ traffickers have been arrested and charged with illegal kidney trafficking. The growing demand and dwindling supply of kidneys has forced many poor individuals in the country to rely on the illegal organ trade. Involvement in trafficking organs is punishable by up to 10 years in jail and a fine of 7,000 dollars. The trade is so popular in the …

By Abrigul Lutfalieva

Johns Hopkins University researchers created a three-dimensional complement of human retinal tissue in the laboratory, which includes functioning photoreceptor cells capable of responding to light, the first step in the process of converting it into visual images.
The study leader M. Valeria Canto-Soler, Ph.D., an assistant professor of ophthalmology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine mentioned that:”We have basically created a miniature human retina in a dish …

By Rebecca Moore

Thought to be an artistic exploit or act of martyrdom, Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh severed his left ear after a psychotic episode in 1888. Van Gogh’s ear has never been recovered, with legends surrounding its mysterious disappearance. Only now with the capabilities of modern technology has the ear resurfaced.
In an effort to combine art and science, artist Diemut Strebe has reconstructed Vincent van Gogh’s ear. Using genetic material …