You often hear about (in the U.S., at least) the great need/demand for organ donations and the many people waiting on transplant lists for one new organ or another.
That just lead me to wonder…what’s the largest amount of people that, at this moment, the organ transplant infrastructure could harvest organs from, at any one time? Say, if 500 fairly healthy people suddenly had massive brain hemorrhages in hospitals across the country tomorrow, could they all have their organs harvested within hours?
Ranchoth at least some of the problem is that organs can’t just be handed out on a first come first served basis. Organs need to be matched with the recipient. If somebody dies and they aren’t a match for any recipients the organs are simply left to rot.
Well, I think that may be part of the OP’s question.
How big is the organ-transplant infrastructure? How long does it take to type-match donors to recipients? If 500, or 5000 people all become suitable donors at once, would there be sufficient type to type match the 499th or 4,999th donor before their tissues rotted?
And if they could all be typed quickly enough, are there enough surgical teams able to properly remove the organs? Helicopter (plane?) transportation to the recipients? How far do organs need to be taken, on average?
Very interesting question from the OP.
The distance varies enormously. An organ may be used in the same hospital, or transported several hundred miles. Who get the organ depends first on tissue typing. Only if you get more than one match would factors like relative distance and stuff like that enter into the equation, and that would be a rare happening.
A lot depends on the aircraft available, and the weather. After all, you don’t want a flight crew to crash in a storm while trying to deliver one of those igloo coolers.
Anyhow, aircraft - depends on what’s available. I’m not 100% clear on where they get these aircraft. And there may be more than one involved. For instance, it’s plausible that a helicoptor might take an organ from a hospital to an airport where it’s loaded onto an airplane (planes are faster than choppers, as a general rule) then taken to another airport where it’s loaded onto another helicoptor for transport to the destination hospital. Or a car might transport an organ between hospital and airport and vice versa.
If the weather is really crappy the organ will go by ground - which severely limits the realistic distance that can be crossed.
…and I thought from the title that this thread was going to be about the maximum number of organs that could be taken from one person and still have that person survive…
Very well put—better that I said it, I think. :smack:
And I do realize that the would-be donors would be on life support systems, so it’s not like they’d be slowly moldering on a slab while frantic, race against time tissue typing took place. But I think the OP question still holds out.