Similarly a friend work for Alabamas football program and he couldn’t travel with the team to games in 2020 because he _hadn’t_ had Covid, while those who had gotten Covid could travel.
Basically… it’s hard to formulate rules for these sort of things and rarely are they “fair” to all involved.
You're now changing your idea to add "over someone who may need it more", which is different, and I'm not disagreeing with that. It's the same as favoring young or healthy people because they're likely to gain more life extension from a transplant when the rest of their body is working OK.
There was and is no condescension present. I don't look down on them just like I wouldn't look down on a 90 year old man whose liver is failing from natural causes. Neither would be my first choice for recipients of my liver.
Also, I have no idea if matters or not but he is wealthy (low eight digits) as well.
Smoking is the big no-no because it is fairly well proven to impair healing and increases chances of failure.
Evidence against red meat is very weak, and contradictory. Some studies show no harmful effects from non-processed red meat at all. In fact, there is just as much evidence against plant-based diets (they just aren't discussed widely due to the prevailing politics around CO2 etc), basically it's all just noise. Light alcohol use is absolutely fine in almost every case, and John Hopkins routinely does liver transplants for dependent alcoholics with an alcohol-related liver disease.
You should look up some centenarians cases, some lived on a diet of nothing but beer, waffles and blood sausages daily for several decades, and then had a nice healthy liver on autopsy at 100+ y.o., could've been from someone in their 20s.
Such is life.
I'm also in agreement that cessation of alcohol and smoking are much more reasonable requirements for placement on the list than other dietary patterns that are highly individual regarding effects on overall health.
The diet stuff... honestly, nutrition "science" is full of contradictions. Sure, too much of anything is probably bad for you, but I don't think diet concerns should be a blocker for receiving a transplant.
At any rate, sorry you and your family has to go through this, and best wishes for your uncle's recovery.
For policies like quarantine following travel does it make any sense to distinguish anyone whether they have had covid, had a vaccine, had both a vaccine and covid, or had neither a vaccine or covid? Aren’t all of the above equally capable of carrying and transmitting the virus?
The best to hope for is not to die, be hospitalized, or suffer various long-term or permanent effects. Vaccination is all we have to prevent those.
That's the point. If you wanted to ensure people to not get COVID, do not give those who have had COVID pleasant exemptions. They failed, they should not be rewarded.
No. If I had Covid a month ago and recovered then baring a compromised immune system or new variant I am not going to get it again this month. So I am not "equally capable of carrying and transmitting the virus" compared to someone who "had neither a vaccine or covid".
I understand that you would have antibodies and it be very unlikely if you carry the virus it would be unlikely to overwhelm your immune system in that time, but you can still carry/spread it right?
More directly related to the policy in question they can test you for antibodies, and maybe it is immaterial, but do they distinguish if you had covid 1 month ago vs 3 months vs 6 months? So does it work on the honor system or are they testing for antibodies, is it simply a matter of if you had covid at any point it doesn’t matter if you still carry antibodies you are not subject to quarantine?
Once you have recovered? I don't think so, at least not if you have a healthy immune system.
Having anti-bodies reduces the viral load in your body, which also means that there are fewer viral fragments exiting your body
The policies are to reduce spread, not eliminate it
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/01/13/pig-heart...
What makes him any less deserving? I don’t want to downplay the fact that he stabbed a guy, but the criminal justice system sentenced him and he, by all accounts, appears to have regretted his actions and reformed to be a good person. It seems like the system worked far better than it usually ever does. Once you’ve gone through the system and come out the other side rehabilitated, you’re done: continuing to deny random services, including in this case access to experimental surgery, is just cruel and seems really a desire for continued revenge against this person (which I definitely understand from a human perspective, but definitely does not belong in our social services scheduling).
Why? Normally you do this because you want people that cannot reform to stay away without resorting to murder. This person was gravely ill, which is it's own prison.
People are waiting for human heart transplants and dying from the wait. I don't think there will be a shortage of patients who we can ethically treat whilst researching this new technique. It certainly isn't binary with a hard "sensitive line".
Does it? I'm definitely not a doctor, but it seems like a very difficult question to answer.
Even with perfect information, it seems unlikely there is always a simple/single answer. I would naively expect things like (and I'm making a bit up here, because I'm really not a doctor) "not enough oxygen reached his cells, because his lungs were bad at refreshing the air in them, his heart was bad at pumping blood in circles, his veins and arteries were in bad shape due to diet, and he wasn't moving around much because he had a cold further reducing circulation".
But also, we don't have perfect information. We have this set of measurements we could make without harming the patient, or consuming too much time on really expensive equipment like MRIs. Many of those measurements are no doubt themselves subject to some degree of interpretation error and confounding factors.
Maybe I underestimate our doctors, or overestimate the problem, but it doesn't sound easy to me.
"How often do autopsies turn up a major misdiagnosis in the cause of death? I would have guessed this happened rarely, in 1 or 2 percent of cases at most. According to three studies done in 1998 and 1999, however, the figure is about 40 percent."
It's disturbing to learn how thin the evidence is for a lot of modern medical operations. For example, the recommendations for certain cancer screenings have actually been reduced in recent years after it was found they were causing net harm.
This is especially true for severe cases like this, people in the ICU, etc.
If someone is in the ICU for multi-system organ failure, gets an infection, and then dies of multi-system organ failure, did the infection kill them? Was it a contributory cause? The same sort of question arises as in this case.
Yes and no, I think.
Technically my dad died of asphyxia. His cancer had spread to his lungs, he'd gotten pneumonia and was in hospital on oxygen. The doctors were clear he wouldn't be going home in the months he potentially had left. So he asked to be disconnected from the oxygen and he died an hour later.
So did he really die of asphyxia? Was it pneumonia, or the cancer? Clearly they were contributing factors, but in the end it was his decision to stop the oxygen, so as such was it suicide?
To me it doesn't really matter. He's gone and I'm just glad he didn't have to hang on to the bitter end.
Does it? As far as I know, not only are they happy to admit that they can't do it, efforts to try have mostly ceased. We used to do autopsies.
https://www.todaysgeriatricmedicine.com/archive/SO17p26.shtm...
> In the United States it is estimated that the rate of major errors (eg, incorrect cause of death [CoD], incorrect manner of death) found on death certificates completed at academic institutions is approximately 33% to 40%. Internationally, this rate at some hospitals rises as high as 80%
> A wealth of literature is available highlighting the prevalence of death certificate inaccuracy seen at the national and international levels, as well as multiple studies that indicate lack of training as the root cause in the United States. Despite these noted errors, death certificate data continue to inform research pathways and drive medical practice.
https://americanmind.org/salvo/a-covid-death-the-bureaucracy...
> natural cause of death reports are known to have a 20 percent to 60 percent inaccuracy rate according to the peer-reviewed literature.
> The system isn’t built to allow for investigation. In fact, in the state where I worked, doctors are supposed to provide causes of death within 15 hours of the death
> 30 percent of doctors have reported being instructed by the coroner to put an inaccurate cause of death on purpose so the [coroner's] office won’t need to take the case.
> When I worked as a death certificate clerk, I occasionally would send death certificate worksheets to multiple doctors involved in a patient’s care if we had a rush to bury or cremate. In these situations we needed to cast a wider net to find a rapidly responding doctor to finish the record before final disposition. Many times each physician would report an entirely different cause of death.
Death certificates and cause-of-death attribution mainly exist to satisfy procedural requirements, not because they're supposed to be informative or helpful. Courts need to do cause-of-death attribution. It can't be done. So they solve their problem by the very simple method of pretending they can do it anyway. (Courts take this approach everywhere, not just in death certificates. Drug dogs, accounting errors, expert testimony...)
If he had survived for a long time, we would have known that it worked. He didn't survive, so we didn't learn much.
If we try with enough people who are as critical as him, eventually one could survive and we would know that the procedure works for at least some people.
The chance they don't understand in great, great detail the cause of Mr. Bennett's death is nearly zero. The chance that IRBs aren't equipped to handle the ethics of this decision in the future are also very low.
[0] https://www.wionews.com/world/patient-in-ground-breaking-hea...
I suppose he made a good guinea pig, though.
Better him than actual guinea pigs.
https://www.swordandscale.com/murder-charges-under-the-delay...
That sounds like murder to me. Call it what it is. A slow death committed with the intention of a fast death doesn't make it not a murder.
I could've written this. Further, HIPAA has exclusions for dead research patients.
Do you think they should be doing this on a bunch of healthy people to "learn more"? Like you think there will be volunteers?
Or do you think it's simply impossible and shouldn't have been done at all?
Or are you just being contrary to be contrary?
This is advocating for civil engineers to willingly approve on a bridge they have no evidence won’t collapse, just because the current bridge needs serious replacement.
The man with the pig heart died. Sounds bad. Pig heart not good.
Swipe.
Next newsflash.