Transplants

Are you a registered organ donor? If so, you should get a break. But instead you're getting the shaft. Now registered organ donors around the United States are uniting to get fair treatment. If you've agreed to donate your organs when you die, your generosity can save lives. Last year in the United States, about 22,000 people received organs transplanted from deceased donors. But registered organ donors who need transplants are treated no better than people who have declined to donate their organs when they die. As a result, every year, thousands of registered organ donors die waiting for transplants when the organs that could have saved their lives are given to nondonors.

The Maryland Senate joined the House of Delegates yesterday in approving legislation that backers hope will significantly increase the number of human organs available for transplants.The Senate gave itself a rare round of applause after unanimous passage of the bill -- a response to the state's rapidly expanding list of people in need of transplants."We have people literally dying waiting to get organs," said Sen. Paula C. Hollinger, the bill's chief sponsor.The House passed an identical measure last week, meaning final passage of the legislation is assured.

CHICAGO -- At 56 years old, Luis Esparza Sr. feels like a "new man," and for that he thanks Luis Esparza Jr. and the four tiny incisions his son now sports on his abdomen as well as a 3-inch cut near his belly button.Through the smaller holes, doctors slipped a tiny camera and surgical tools. They then slipped one of the younger Esparza's kidneys, drained of blood, through the larger hole. The organ was then transplanted into his ailing father.This relatively new and less traumatic procedure for taking kidneys from a living donor was tried at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago last week for the first time.

Can I grow tomato seedlings in a sunny window and get good results?A window with an unobstructed Southern exposure may give you sufficient light. However, vegetable and flower transplants grown windowsills are subject to drafts and temperature extremes. Often the result is a spindly plant.It's best to grow transplants under 4-foot-long "shop lights," fitted with cool, white fluorescent light tubes. Run the lights 14-16 hours each day, keep the tops of your seedlings only 1-2 inches from the light tubes and don't overwater.

Johns Hopkins announced yesterday that it is consolidating its organ and bone marrow transplant services in a new Johns Hopkins Comprehensive Transplant Center.As part of the organizational change, the kidney transplant program will be moved from Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center to Johns Hopkins Hospital."This lets us better serve patients, achieve economies and plan physician and staff time more efficiently," said Ronald Peterson, acting president of the Johns Hopkins Health System.Dr.

Francis "Max" Factor Jr., 91, a makeup executive who assumed his father's legacy of making stars and housewives look good, died of heart failure Friday at his West Los Angeles home. He was 91.Mr. Factor collaborated with his father, the legendary Max Factor Sr., in 1935 to invent pancake makeup, a beauty aide that kept actors' faces from appearing green in Technicolor films. But when actors began taking the stuff home, and sharing it with friends, Factor's father began mass-producing it and his cosmetics company was born.

The call comes in the dead of night, often on a weekend. Somewhere in Maryland, a seriously ill person is awakened by a bedside beeper. The messenger brings salvation, in this world at least. A heart has arrived. Your lung is in. We have a kidney for you. Are you ready?It's the University of Maryland Medical Center calling. In four years, Maryland has built one of the busiest transplant centers in the country. In 1995 alone, transplants at Maryland rose 69 percent. The hospital now does more transplants than Johns Hopkins, the historic local leader.

CHICAGO -- Researchers from Chicago, New York and Florida report the first proof that fetal tissue transplants survived, grew and functioned in the brain of a Parkinson's patient, a milestone that eventually may lead to new therapies for Huntington's, Alzheimer's, strokes and other disorders.The transplant was linked to a significant improvement in the patient's condition, freeing him from the prison of rigidity and immobility, the main symptoms of the disease, and enabling him to enroll in an exercise class.

The boundary line between human beings and animals has never been altogether clear. Now -- as we read about laboratory mice with human genes and contemplate a future of pig-to-people organ transplants -- the ancient fantasy of a chimera, a being part human and part animal, is fast becoming a scientific reality.The news from the laboratories is spectacular and more than a little science-fictionish. Among the new creatures that have been created is the ''oncomouse,'' which develops human cancers, and other mice that model other human ailments such as Alzheimer's and diabetes.

WASHINGTON -- The Food and Drug Administration announced yesterday that beginning next week it would regulate the sale of bone, skin and other tissues used for transplants to help protect recipients from infection with the virus that causes AIDS.Two years ago, officials found that a Virginia donor who died in a 1985 shooting had been infected with HIV, even though two tests on his blood before the removal of his organs and tissues did not detect the human immunodeficiency virus. Three people who had received transplants from the donor later died of AIDS.

Six kidney patients at Johns Hopkins Hospital received new organs from six unrelated living donors Saturday in what the chief surgeon called the nation's first six-way "domino" kidney swap. Nearly 100 medical professionals took part in the transplants, which began simultaneously in different operating rooms. Surgery stretched over 13 hours. All 12 donors and recipients were listed in good condition yesterday, a hospital spokesman said. Some had gone home while others were still recovering in the hospital.

Federal and local officials are investigating whether four Chicago patients who contracted HIV from organ transplants passed on the disease during the months when they were unaware of their infections, health officials said yesterday. The four patients contracted HIV and hepatitis C from an infected donor in January, and they did not know of the potential risk to their partners and close contacts until they tested positive for the diseases in the past two weeks. The infected donor had not tested positive for the diseases, likely because the infections were too recent to register on screening tests, officials said.

Are you a registered organ donor? If so, you should get a break. But instead you're getting the shaft. Now registered organ donors around the United States are uniting to get fair treatment. If you've agreed to donate your organs when you die, your generosity can save lives. Last year in the United States, about 22,000 people received organs transplanted from deceased donors. But registered organ donors who need transplants are treated no better than people who have declined to donate their organs when they die. As a result, every year, thousands of registered organ donors die waiting for transplants when the organs that could have saved their lives are given to nondonors.

NEWARK, N.J. --Three times, the Waters family knew the bone-deep dread of losing their baby, Noble Tyre Waters, who had a severely diseased colon and needed a transplant. After undergoing three transplants, Noble died five years ago at the age of 15 months. "I can't begin to imagine the pain and agony for those families who were able to extend our son's life, but I can imagine the joy, when hope seemed not to exist, of being told three times that our son had gotten a reprieve," said Noble's father, Robert Kevin Waters, who sponsors a Little League team called the Lifesavers to help spread the word about organ donations.

The cornea of the eye seems so simple a structure - yet it's so important and so tricky to re-create in a lab. It is the eye's protective window, keeping out dirt, debris and germs. It's a lens that helps focus light so that we can see. But when a cornea becomes cloudy or scarred from disease, injury or infection, the path of light into the eye can be distorted or blocked, resulting in blindness. Transplanting human corneas from cadavers can restore someone's vision. But because of a tissue shortage, only 100,000 corneal transplants are performed worldwide annually - serving just 1 percent of the 10 million people who are stricken with corneal blindness.

Hours after their son's death June 21, 1995, the parents of 25-year-old Randolph Scott Jr. made the daunting decision to donate their son's organs. The choice, a rarity in the African-American community, was prompted by their son's forethought to become a donor. "Scottie," as they called him, had registered to become a potential donor by indicating it on his driver's license. "Not only did we know that it was what he wanted, but since we did we agreed very quickly that it was the right thing to do to save someone else's life," says Robin Williams, Scott's mother.

CHICAGO - Socialist and communist governments have nationalized all sorts of things: oil and gas fields, phone companies, steel mills, coal mines, airlines and farms. Now the American Medical Association, which generally does not favor collective ownership of the means of production, has proposed to go even further. It suggests nationalizing corpses. The United States has a severe shortage of kidneys, livers, lungs and other human organs needed by patients awaiting transplants. The AMA thinks we might close the gap between supply and demand by confiscating body parts from people who no longer need them.

Everyone knows if you want to grow tomatoes, hot peppers, sweet peppers or any other vegetables that need a longer stretch of warmth to fruit than we have here in Maryland, you need to put plants (sometimes called transplants) -- not seeds -- in the ground in late spring. Gardeners have long had a choice about how to do that. We could grab whatever varieties of vegetable transplants the garden center offered in mid-April. Or, if we wanted to grow eight different tomatoes, five kinds of sweet peppers and some really wild hot peppers to say nothing of leeks, we could start them from seed -- indoors in late February -- ourselves.

Not long ago, the thought of transplanting a kidney into salesman Derek Kee, a heart into statistician Robert Zackin or a liver into playwright Larry Kramer would have defied all reason. All suffered from HIV infection before their organs went bad, and under the old rules, the drugs needed to protect their transplants would surely have crippled their immune systems even more. Giving scarce organs to patients who didn't have long to live was considered wasteful, even unethical. Like so many things about AIDS, that view is slowly giving way to another, articulated by Dr. Stephen T. Bartlett, a surgeon at the University of Maryland Medical Center who performed Kee's transplant last month.

Organ donation wrings solace from tragedy I thank reporter Diana K. Sugg for her poignant reminder of the importance of organ donation ("Celebrating a life, honoring one lost," Feb. 15). In the face of grief, a donor's family is asked to perform a noble act of humanity. Consent brings continuity and perhaps some degree of solace from sparing another family such a tragic loss. In 2003, more than 80,000 people in the United States will await life-saving transplants - and 2,000 of them are children.