To the Editor:
Re “Organ Donation Needs to Be Trustworthy,” by Greg Segal (Opinion guest essay, Sept. 22):
I have spent years working alongside the professionals who make organ donation possible. And that experience is difficult to reconcile with the sweeping picture painted by Mr. Segal in his essay.
Here is what I know about the organ donation system: Patient safety is foundational, donation decisions are governed by strict ethical and clinical safeguards, and the teams who coordinate donation are deeply committed to upholding the trust placed in them by patients, donor families and the public.
While any serious concerns should be thoroughly investigated, isolated allegations should not define an entire national system or the thousands of professionals working every day to save lives. The truth is that organ procurement organizations are held to high standards of safety and accountability by both federal and state regulators and undergo rigorous audits and evaluations.
Those in our field continue to learn and improve this system every day. New national safeguards approved by the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network strengthen patient protections, including formal procedures to pause donation if concerns arise. The organ procurement organizations themselves support transparent oversight, meaningful accountability and continuous improvement across the donation and transplant system.
Organ donation depends on public trust. Protecting that trust depends on accurate portrayals of the professionals, donor families and donor heroes whose extraordinary generosity gives thousands of Americans a second chance at life each year.
Allison Erickson Waltham, Mass. The writer is the president of the Association of Organ Procurement Organizations.
To the Editor:
The conversation about how we fix the organ donation shortage must go beyond deceased donation. Living organ donation deserves far more attention.
I became a living kidney donor when my wife needed a transplant. I ultimately donated through a paired kidney exchange after discovering that I was not a direct match for her. That experience showed me firsthand how living donation can change someone’s life without endangering the life of the donor. The laparoscopic surgery is generally safer than an appendectomy.
Too few Americans understand that living kidney donation is an option available to healthy adults. If we are serious about helping people waiting for kidneys, expanding awareness of living donation — especially indirect paired exchanges — must be a much bigger part of the solution.
Ron Wolfson Los Angeles The writer is an author of “To Save One Life: The Miracle of Living Kidney Donation, Transplantation and How You Can Make It Happen” and a founder of the To Save One Life foundation.
To the Editor:
As a kidney and pancreas transplant recipient who spent 22 grueling months on dialysis waiting for a transplant, I am alarmed by the real-world consequences of Greg Segal’s essay and the fears that portrayals of organ donation like his so often spread.
Scaring people away from donation and boasting about removing himself from the donor registry run in direct contrast to his stated goal of reforming and improving the system. He does not speak for me or the countless Americans who have had or will need organ transplants.
Special interest groups are lobbying to commercialize our nonprofit organ donation system. They intentionally portray the system as an irredeemable failure, all so that billion-dollar corporations can step in and sell costly solutions to the government.
It is important that readers hear from transplant patients on this issue, not just those who claim to represent them. It is time for activists to quit playing politics with patients’ lives and stop destroying the nonprofit system that saved mine.
Patrick McGlone Point Pleasant, N.J.
Don’t Eat Beef
To the Editor:
Re “Trump’s 660 Million Pounds of Mystery Meat,” by Eric Schlosser (Opinion guest essay, Sept. 9):
Simply not eating beef is the easiest and cheapest personal choice someone can make to limit our climate disaster, which is now in full swing.
William Ira Bennett Somerville, Mass.
The post The State of Organ Donation appeared first on New York Times.
