Tens of thousands of organ donor families and recipients have communicated with each other and, in the great majority of
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EDITORIAL
Tens of thousands of organ donor families and recipients have communicated with each other and, in the great majority of cases, the results have been positive for both sides Reg Green1
© Italian Society of Nephrology 2020
I am the father of Nicholas Green, the 7-year-old American boy who was shot in an attempted robbery on the SalernoReggio Calabria highway in 1994 and whose organs and corneas were donated to seven very sick Italians, four of them teenagers. The Italian people responded with all-enveloping compassion. But they did more: they directed these generous emotions into the most appropriate, the most satisfying, channels: in the 10 years after Nicholas died, organ donation rates in Italy tripled, a rate of increase no other country has ever come close to. Thousands of people, many of them painfully young at the time, are alive who otherwise would have died. After 26 years five of the seven recipients are still living, although one is back on dialysis and another had a second corneal transplant. Considering that most of these people were dangerously close to death or going blind at the time of their transplant it is a remarkable tribute to the skills of the whole Italian transplant community. In those 26 years my wife, Maggie, and I have talked to everyone who will listen—including fifty visits to Italy—to remind them how little it takes to save multiple lives. For almost all that time I have stayed clear of speaking about Italian law, taking the view that as a foreigner it was not my place to give advice on such sensitive issues. But one aspect of the law kept nagging at me: law 91/99, which forbids healthcare personnel from giving out any information about either donor families or recipients. It was passed with the best intentions, to protect privacy, but has had some cold-blooded—even cruel—results. It effectively means that neither side knows anything but the bare minimum about the other.
* Reg Green [email protected] https://www.nicholasgreen.org 1
La Cañada Flintridge, CA, USA
Some people, it’s true, don’t want to know anything more: they saved someone’s life or their own life was saved. Now they want to put all that behind them. But many others do very much want to know. They feel their lives are incomplete: they don’t even know if the recipients are alive and it eats at them. In some cases, they feel chronically unsettled. It seems harsh treatment for people who, while suffering a devastating loss, set their grieving aside long enough to help complete strangers in desperate need. In the United States, where I live, the institutions that oversee postoperative patient care—the 58 organ procurement organizations (OPOs) appointed by the US Department of Health—are unanimous in their belief that communication is good for the health and happiness of both sides in the great majority of cases. The procedures are carefully controlled and, before anything is done, both families have to confirm that they would like to communicate. If they do, one party sends an anonymous letter, vetted by t
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