UK doctors say they followed government standards for selecting donor organs when they implanted a 28 year-old woman with the lungs of a 30-year smoker. She died of pneumonia five months later.
The family of Lyndsey Scott, a cystic fibrosis patient, did not know that the transplanted lungs were donated by a life-long smoker.
The Independent, a British newspaper, has the story and the comments from the national clinical director for transplantation, Chris Rudge:
“Surgeons have to make decisions – about four out of every five lungs that become available for transplantation are not used because they are not working well enough.
Four out of five lungs are rejected, but a 30-year smoker provided the one they chose?
A spokesman for the University Hospital of South Manchester NHS Foundation Trust (UHSM) said that “UHSM and other transplant centres have extended their criteria” because many patients die waiting for a lung transplant, thus “increasing the number of viable lungs available for donation that are still considered to be ’safe:’”
The family of the patient who died said they only found out about the donor’s smoking history after requesting the medical records for the operation following Miss Scott’s death. Here’s betting the National Health Service won’t be giving out records so freely in the future.
