New York City officials plan within months to dispatch the nation’s first ambulance equipped to preserve bodies of the newly dead so that families have time to consider organ donation.
The controversial twist: Crews would swoop in and perform procedures on a corpse without consent in order to preserve the organs until the family had time [...]

WHEN IS A person dead — or dead enough?
The question has long influenced decisions about when it’s appropriate to end medical treatment for people who are hopelessly ill. However, a quieter debate has simmered for years about how the concept of death informs the practice of organ transplantation. Transplant surgeons rely on strict definitions of [...]

There’s new hope for the five million people in the United States who live with heart failure. Scientists say they have been able to grow a rat heart in a lab. They were also successful at getting it to start beating.About 50,000 people die each year waiting for a heart donor. But that all may [...]

Britain’s prime minister called Sunday for overhauling the country’s organ donation system, saying doctors should be able to remove body parts from deceased patients without prior needing consent.
Gordon Brown noted in an opinion piece Sunday that more than a thousand people die in Britain each year waiting for organ transplants. Switching to a Spanish-style “opt-out” [...]

Avoid gender biased care
Despite concerted efforts to fight two-tier medicine in Ontario, new evidence suggests that it is far more prevalent than anyone believed.
But the kind of two-tier medicine highlighted in a study to be published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal next month is not a result of public versus private care. It is [...]

Aging Boomers: Me Generation’s health concerns expected to propel biotech[Extract] By 1989, a boomer’s median net worth was $36,000, according to Paul Root Wolpe, president of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities. By 2001, it swelled to $107,000. Home equity included, that number now is about $400,000.
“Never before has an older generation controlled so much [...]

A bill in Britain would loosen restrictions on the creation of “savior siblings” to allow parents of sick children to use in-vitro fertilization to create designer babies. These children would be used to treat the medical conditions of siblings by supplying bone marrow or umbilical-cord blood shortly after birth.

Disability rights campaigners yesterday criticised a mother’s request for her teenage daughter, who has severe cerebral palsy to have a hysterectomy.Alison Thorpe says the operation is in the best interests of her daughter, Katie, to spare her the monthly discomfort of menstruating. But the medical consent application being prepared on behalf of the 15-year-old from [...]

Ethics behind artificial birth still murky
Assisted reproductive technology, in all its forms, raises ethical and moral questions. Issues such as how to handle stored embryos that aren’t used, whether to remove embryos when more than one develops, sorting out surrogacy legalities and figuring out who’s in charge of keeping clinics in line.
Little regulation exists in [...]

CAMPAIGNERS fighting to increase the number of organ donors in Wales have called on the Chief Medical Officer to break his silence on presumed consent. And the Kidney Wales Foundation has appealed for new Wales-only laws to change the current organ donor system from an opt-in one to an opt-out system.
Neither Chief Medical Officer Dr [...]