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Team members will be sent to the scene in a specialized "Organ Preservation Ambulance," but will only enter the home after a person has been declared dead. Once there, they must determine whether the person is a registered organ donor and they must check whether the person has any medical conditions -- such as cancer or AIDS -- that would eliminate them as candidates.
And they must get the permission of family in a matter of minutes.
That's a task that the medical community has long considered nearly impossible, said Dr. Hasan Yersiz, director of organ procurement at the University of California Los Angeles.
"Think about it," he said. "You have somebody dying and you have to make that decision very fast. It's not an easy situation."
The pilot program team has been told they have 50 minutes from the time a person's heart stops beating to the time his or her body must be placed in the ambulance and hooked up to a machine that creates blood circulation. Once at Bellevue, another machine will increase body oxygen. Only residents of the island of Manhattan who are between 18 and 59 will be eligible for the pilot program.
Similar programs are already in place in France and Spain, where there are fewer barriers because people in those countries are considered organ donors unless they opt out, Goldfrank said. In the U.S., a person must register as a donor -- in New York state it's almost always done through the DMV -- and family must also consent to the procedure after death.
In America, "people are very concerned about protecting individual rights," said Nancy Neveloff Dubler, a bioethicist with the Montefiore-Einstein Center for Bioethics who advised those developing the pilot program. "The technology is there, the question is will we use it for the good of people who are waiting for organs."
[Associated
Press;
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