Dick Cheney finally has a heart

[Chimera]

He was probably asking for it.

[BlankSlate]

I wish this was a sci-fi story. Cheney gets the heart of a die-hard liberal, and suddenly he’s all over the talk shows, championing univrsal health care and obama’s re-election.

[Johnny_L.A]

@Tom_Tildrum

Apparently the donor was an otherwise healthy young person who was mysteriously killed by a shotgun near Cheney’s home. Strange coincidence.

I hope this young person apologised.

[madmonk28]

@Frank

I think you should shake that feeling. If he got moved up on the list, it wouldn’t have taken 20 months for him to get a heart. Something like 4000 people in the U.S. had heart transplants while Cheney was waiting. It’s the luck of the draw.

The luck of the draw would be a lot better if more people would allow their organs, or the organs of the relative that they are next of kin of, to be used. I don’t think it’s important that my heart, or my kidney, or my cornea be cremated along with the rest of me, and I find it disgusting that so many people refuse to allow their useless remains to be used to benefit the still living.

Yeah, but now I want to change my donor card to say no parts can go to anyone from the Bush administration (although they would be free to kiss my ass).

[billfish678]

If he books a vacation to Whoville next Christmas…

[Fear_Itself]

@Frank

…I find it disgusting that so many people refuse to allow their useless remains to be used to benefit the still living.

I find it disgusting that body brokers reap hundreds of thousands of dollars without compensating the donor’s family.

[Smapti]

Cheney’s doctor said that his new heart was exactly right for him.

I.e., it was two sizes too small.

[Alka_Seltzer]

I feel sorry for the heart, imagine being implanted into Dick Cheney? Possibly the most unfortunate transplant since George Best was given a new liver.

[Ludovic]

@Tom_Tildrum

Apparently the donor was an otherwise healthy young person who was mysteriously killed by a shotgun near Cheney’s home. Strange coincidence.

If I had a son, he would not look like Dick Cheney.

[Autolycus]

@Little_Nemo

Maybe next somebody will give Bush a brain.

And (to keep in bipartisan) Obama could use some courage.

That would make for a very amusing political cartoon.

[PandaBear77]

Kerrigan, thanks for your answer. All this time I thought organ transplant lists were nationwide – I didn’t know there were local ones but it makes sense that there would be.

I’m surprised Cheney got a heart at all. He’s 71! Isn’t there some kind of unwritten age cutoff for transplants?

[LouisB]

This is just a little bitty hijack but I’m an organ donor and I’m 72 years old. Would they even think about harvesting my heart?

[The_Devil_s_Grandmother]

@Wesley_Clark

On an unrelated note, I was reading in a science magazine that there are already people walking around who have lived for a few years with artificial hearts. They claim it’ll take about 10 years for the design to improve and FDA testing to be passed before they are ready for the US public.

Maybe next Cheney can try that. i remember on Maddow someone was talking about how Cheney’s cardiac history pretty much mirrors the advances in heart disease science. As a new development comes about Cheney would use it right when it comes out.

Didn’t Cheney already have a mechanical heart? There was a thread a while back about how he had no pulse.

[Kerrigan]

@The_Devil_s_Grandmother

Didn’t Cheney already have a mechanical heart? There was a thread a while back about how he had no pulse.

He had a ventricular assist device, which is, in the best case scenario, transition therapy to a heart transplant.

[CalMeacham]

Where did he get the heart from?

I sorta have this mental image of Cheney as Russell Edgington of True Blood rushing up to an on-camera anchorman and yanking out his heart on-camera.
“I’m the Vice President! I’m in charge! Gimme that!”

[Kerrigan]

@LouisB

This is just a little bitty hijack but I’m an organ donor and I’m 72 years old. Would they even think about harvesting my heart?

There is no hard upper limit for donor age. Depending on the need for organs, the “automatic cutoff” at any given time can be adjusted. That is–if they’re really desperate, they’ll take a look at a 72-year old potential donor. Of course, it all depends in the end on how you are about to die. If it’s a brain injury and the rest of your body is working fine, they very well may check you out.

[Frank]

@Fear_Itself

I find it disgusting that body brokers reap hundreds of thousands of dollars without compensating the donor’s family.

I’m not going to argue that anyone making vast profits off an organ donor’s organs is justified. Certainly there’s a place for transport companies who should expect to make a reasonable profit, just as the hospitals and surgeons do. Is this what you’re referring to?

[Fear_Itself]

@Frank

I’m not going to argue that anyone making vast profits off an organ donor’s organs is justified. Certainly there’s a place for transport companies who should expect to make a reasonable profit, just as the hospitals and surgeons do. Is this what you’re referring to?

I don’t begrudge anyone reasonable profits; it is the utterly obscene profits generated by a bereaved family’s altruistic donation that disgust me, as well as the deceptive practices that hide the true nature of the use of body donations, from testing firearms and motorcycle helmets to vehicle airbags. Families have no say over what their loved one’s remains are used for.

The Body Brokers: Part 1- Assembly Line

A typical donor produces $14,000 to $34,000 in sales for the nonprofits, records and interviews show. But yields can be far greater.

Skin, tendons, heart valves, veins and corneas are listed at about $110,000. Add bone from the same body, and one cadaver can be worth about $220,000 [ETA: eleven years ago!].

The National Organ Transplant Act, approved by Congress in 1984, banned profits from the sale of tissue. But no company or tissue bank has been prosecuted.

“The law has never been tested in court. Nobody has ever decided what is selling and what isn’t,” said Jeanne Mowe, executive director of the American Association of Tissue Banks.

The Body Brokers - Part 2: Skin Merchants

Burn victims lie waiting in hospitals as nurses scour the country for skin to cover their wounds, even though skin is in plentiful supply for plastic surgeons, an Orange County Register investigation found. The skin they need to save their lives is being used instead for procedures that could wait: supporting bladders, erasing laugh lines and enlarging penises. Donated bodies and tissue such as bones and veins are used in ways most people would never imagine, and profits are made with little oversight.

Tight federal regulations ensure that kidneys, hearts and other internal organs are funneled to patients in the greatest need. But skin, the body’s largest organ, isn’t covered in the law. Instead, it has become a commodity. Of 139 burn centers nationwide, 11 have their own skin banks. Even they, at times, have difficulty finding enough skin for their patients. The rest of the hospitals must call banks nationwide when they need skin and pay whatever price tissue banks are charging that day.

The Body Brokers — Part 3: Researchers

Donated human bodies are replacing crash-test dummies and animals in sometimes-bizarre research projects that are largely hidden from the public, an Orange County Register investigation has found. Like their counterparts in the body-parts industry, researchers at universities and in private business avoid telling families how their loved ones are being used. They fear donations would drop.

…

At least 17,500 bodies are donated to science in the United States every year, according to a Register survey. These bodies are in addition to the 20,000 cadavers used each year by businesses to make products. Most of the bodies donated to science follow a traditional path: to medical schools, where students dissect them, or to medical conferences, where physicians practice their skills on them.

But each year, at least 4,000 bodies become the subjects of wide-ranging experiments, the Register found. Bodies are crashed to test vehicle air bags, heads are dropped to test helmets, and arms are dropped to test snowboard wrist braces. These experiments are seldom discussed publicly and almost never disclosed to would-be donors or their families. Sometimes researchers don’t even tell families they are taking parts from their loved ones’ bodies. Since 1990, the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office has removed parts from hundreds of accident and homicide victims without consent. The coroner gave those parts to researchers. When some families found out, they felt violated and angry.

The Body Brokers — Part 4: Gatekeepers

Human-tissue transplants have caused AIDS, hepatitis and even rabies, but they’re subject to less regulation than a kitchen toaster. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration supervises tissue banks but says it doesn’t know how many exist. FDA and industry leaders say the nation’s tissue supply is safe. But an Orange County Register investigation found gaping holes in the safety net:

No hard statistics back up industry and FDA safety claims. Regulators have focused on a handful of high-profile health threats but have not studied the long-term effects of tissue transplants. None of the federal government’s primary health investigators – the FDA, the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health – routinely tracks deaths or illnesses affecting tissue recipients. A cadaver suspected of carrying disease may be rejected by one tissue bank but accepted by another bank and its tissue sent out to patients.

There are so few inspectors that tissue banks can escape inspection for years, even if the most recent inspector found significant problems. California, one of four states that regulates tissue banks, has not inspected any in nearly two years.

The Body Brokers — Part 5: Pioneers

A family of Russian immigrants came to America with $90 and struck it rich in the body-parts trade. Headed by patriarch El Gendler, the family grossed $24.8 million in salaries, bonuses and fees over five years turning donated human tissue into products, an Orange County Register investigation found.

Gendler co-founded the Pacific Coast Tissue Bank, a nonprofit that seeks donations from grieving families. He also co-founded with his wife a private, for-profit bone-processing firm that gets its raw materials from downtown Los Angeles-based Pacific Coast, records show. “I make a good living,” wrote Gendler, who declined to be interviewed in person. “But I work hard and have a lifetime of work invested. … I am a top scientist, and I receive compensation as such.” Industry critics and ethicists say the Gendlers represent the good and the troubling in the $500 million tissue trade, which thrives on a mix of altruism and money.

More than 175 companies and tissue banks nationwide operate in this fast- growing field, despite laws against profiting from the sale of body parts. The industry does not include agencies that harvest vital organs, such as hearts, livers and kidneys for transplant.

If they want my organs, they can damn well pay the processing fees; I’ve been processing this body for 57 years, and if anybody makes a profit on my remains, my heirs are getting a cut.

[Frank]

@Fear_Itself

I don’t begrudge anyone reasonable profits; it is the utterly obscene profits generated by a bereaved family’s altruistic donation that disgust me, as well as the deceptive practices that hide the true nature of the use of body donations, from testing firearms and motorcycle helmets to vehicle airbags. Families have no say over what their loved one’s remains are used for.

I certainly find that horrendous, and I would fully support better laws and better enforcement of existing laws.

[Boyo_Jim]

@Fear_Itself

I don’t begrudge anyone reasonable profits; it is the utterly obscene profits generated by a bereaved family’s altruistic donation that disgust me, as well as the deceptive practices that hide the true nature of the use of body donations, from testing firearms and motorcycle helmets to vehicle airbags. Families have no say over what their loved one’s remains are used for…

The National Organ Transplant Act, approved by Congress in 1984, banned profits from the sale of tissue. But no company or tissue bank has been prosecuted.

This is no longer true, at least in one sense. In 2005, Dr. Michael Mastromarino was convicted of selling body parts, and his company Biomedical Tissue Services was shut down by the FDA.

It was estimated that he and his staff salvaged body parts from perhaps a thousand corpses without obtaining permission from their families. Most famously they took the skin off the corpse of Alistair Cooke. They also bypassed many of the safety testing regimens for tissue transplants by submitting phony tissue and blood samples to labs who were testing for communicable diseases.

But this doesn’t invalidate Fear Itself’s point, in that it wasn’t the sales or profits that they were prosecuted for, but the “harvesting” without permission. It may be that, since they were paying kickbacks left and right to funeral homes and other providers of corpses, and selling the material the open market (such as it is for human tissue), their profit margin was less than legitimate tissue companies. Then again, stripping corpses in the back room of funeral homes was likely cheaper than doing it in the operating room at a hospital.

How did they make their money? VOLUME! VOLUME! VOLUME!