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Offline Clark

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Australia: Organ charges validate safeguards: academic
« on: July 29, 2011, 10:26:06 PM »
http://www.smh.com.au/national/organ-charges-validate-safeguards-academic-20110728-1i27i.html

Organ charges validate safeguards: academic
Erik Jensen

A RIGOROUS screening process, including multiple psychiatric assessments for altruistic organ donors, has been defended by a leading academic as sufficient to deal with organ trafficking in Australia.
Professor Jeremy Chapman, past president of the Transplantation Society, said Australia had the best scheme in the world to assess potential donors - proven by the prosecution of an attempted incident of organ trafficking, revealed by the Herald yesterday. ''If there are any abnormalities they get chased down,'' said Professor Chapman, who is also an adviser to the National Organ and Tissue Authority.
''Hospitals are not investigation agencies but there are so many checks and balances. There are no quickie transplants.''
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Figures for organ donation revealed that almost half of the living kidney transplants performed in Australia were from people who were not genetically related to the recipient.
Although hospitals do not check financial records to ensure payments have not been made for organs, Professor Chapman said a thorough process of psychiatric and medical assessment ensured all donations were provided with informed consent and without trafficking.
The number of altruistic donations nationally - where there is no genetic or social association between the donor and recipient - is so low as to suggest limited window for trafficking.
The case reported by the Herald yesterday - in which an elderly Sydney woman allegedly trafficked a woman from the Philippines for her kidney - will not lead to a specific review of organ donation in the state. But a spokesman for NSW Health said its living donation policy is regularly reviewed.
The Minister for Health, Jillian Skinner, is expected to issue a White Paper on organ donation in the next few weeks.
The paper is expected to look at abolishing the RTA's opt-in donation scheme in favour of a national strategy, but it is not likely to look at issues of organ trafficking.
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