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Ethicists Debate Ambulance for Organs

Some Worry New York City Plan Could Give Living Patients the Short Shrift

ABC News Medical Unit
May 9, 2008

Ethicists and emergency medicine experts are raising concerns over New York City's plan to dispatch the first ambulance service in the country equipped to preserve the organs of the newly deceased.

They question whether the organ-preserving ambulances will create tension among EMTs who may be charged both to save lives and to preserve organs for reuse.

The aim of the Rapid Organ Recovery Ambulance service, city officials say, is to buy precious time for families to decide whether they want their loved ones' organs to be donated to needy patients.

New York City plans to start the service rolling within a month. And the plan, which has already received federal funding, is being eyed as a possibility by other emergency medical departments.

continued...

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Story?id=4822866&page=1

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"The most stunning statistic, however, is that the total number of deaths caused by conventional medicine is an astounding 783,936 per year. Using Leape's 1997 medical and drug error rate would add another 216,000 deaths, for a total of 999,936 deaths annually. It is now evident that the American medical system is the leading cause of death and injury in the US."
—Gary Null, PhD; Carolyn Dean MD, ND; Martin Feldman, MD; Debora Rasio, MD; Dorothy Smith, PhD, Life Extension Magazine, Death by Medicine, March 2004 (plus 1.5-Million annual aborticides in USA)

http://www.lef.org/magazine/mag2004/mar2004_awsi_death_01.htm

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China's mobile death fleet

By Antoaneta Bezlova
Asia Times
21 July 2006

BEIJING - Responding to criticism that China cruelly and arbitrarily executes a large number of its citizens each year, officials are gradually moving toward what they say is a more discreet way of killing its prisoners: execution vans.

Human-rights critics say they may look more like officially sanctioned roaming death squads, which simply allow China to execute its prisoners quickly, easily and out of the public eye. Chinese legal officials counter that the fleet of execution vehicles is a "more humane" form of carrying out death sentences. One thing for sure: they are a radical departure from publicly held execution rallies organized in the past.

As opposed to the shootings that took place in public, inmates are now executed in purpose-built vans in an almost clinical environment. Prisoners are confined to a bed, similar to an ambulance stretcher, and put to death with lethal injections. The contents of the drug cocktails used for the lethal injections are mixed in Beijing and delivered to local intermediate courts where the trials take place.

China developed its fleet of mobile execution chambers slowly, after cautiously experimenting with lethal injections for the first time in selected provinces beginning in 1997. It is now adopting them on a larger scale in more localities. The exact number of vans being used is a state secret. What is known, however, is that Yunnan province alone has 18 mobile units in use.

"I think it is definitely progress for China, and it shows more consideration both for the people sentenced to death and for others" (their relatives and the public), said Li Guifang, vice chairman of the Criminal Affairs Committee of the All-China Lawyers Association. "There is less pain for the convicted."

The move from firing squad to lethal injection "demonstrates tremendous progress in China's criminal-judgment proceedings", Yin Yong, director of Zhejiang province's Supreme Court, told the state media last month.

First tried out in 1997 in Yunnan province - a southwestern region bordering the Golden Triangle and notorious for its drug trafficking - death vans are now ready for use in booming industrialized places where crime rates have soared, such as the coastal province of Zhejiang. That province plans to start using them from September.

Human-rights groups claim China executes more criminals every year than the rest of the world combined. The exact number remains a highly confidential state secret. Amnesty International recorded at least 1,770 death sentences carried out in China in 2005, but it says the real number could be as high as 8,000.

The mobile death fleet is being touted by Chinese legal officials as the latest advance in China's judicial system as Beijing tries to revamp its international image ahead of playing host to the 2008 Summer Olympic Games.

The vans are now in vogue because they allow for death sentences to be carried out without the usual trip to the execution grounds and they are cheaper - each execution van is priced at about 500,000 yuan (US$60,000) and, of course, can be reused. Lethal injections require only four people to assist in the execution, while the practice of death by firing squad needs numerous guards at the execution site and along the road to the site.

The vans also prove that China has abandoned a long-standing practice of public executions. After China signed the United Nations Convention against Torture in 1984, it issued new regulations banning execution rallies. Rights activists claim, however, that the rallies have continued during the various "Strike Hard" anti-crime crackdowns first initiated by the government in 1983 and revived in 1996. But these rallies no long happen in large cities where foreigners live.

Yet as mobile execution chambers begin to roll silently into more and more towns, making capital punishment easier and faster to deliver, fears have risen among human-rights activists and death-penalty opponents that China is relying more on lethal injection because it is harvesting organs of executed prisoners in an effort to supply the country's growing market for organ transplants.

Chinese hospitals started organ transplants in the 1960s and now perform between 10,000 and 20,000 transplants annually, according to official figures. A kidney transplant in China costs about $7,200, but this official price could swell to $20,000 or even $50,000 if the patient is willing to pay more to obtain an organ sooner. Even those prices, though, amount only to a fraction of the price for an organ transplant in developed countries.

China carried out 8,000 kidney transplants last year but only 270, or fewer than 4% of the organs, came from voluntary donations.

In China, it is illegal to remove organs without the permission of the person in question or his family members, but critics say these obligations are commonly violated, not the least because of the secrecy surrounding such operations. Regulations issued in 1984 stipulate that the removal of organs from executed prisoners should be "kept strictly secret, and attention must be paid to avoiding negative repercussions".

Authorities routinely refuse to give relatives access to bodies of executed prisoners, cremating them quickly after the executions, says Robin Munro, a British expert on China's criminal justice system.

"Once the body is cremated, it is impossible to determine whether any organs have been removed," she said.

www.atimes.com/atimes/China/HG21Ad01.html

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Originally posted by Foster:
I have never been told by any Physician not to donate organs. My father is a physician and I run a medical clinic with five others and they say that it is an individual choice but that they are organ donors. So why would they sign up to be chopped up alive?

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HOW TO SIGN ANY ADHESION CONTRACT WITHOUT WAIVING RIGHT TO LIFE

Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) § 1-207.

Performance or Acceptance Under Reservation of Rights.

(1) A party who with explicit reservation of rights performs or promises performance or assents to performance in a manner demanded or offered by the other party does not thereby prejudice the rights reserved. Such words as "without prejudice", "under protest" or the like are sufficient.

http://www.law.cornell.edu/ucc/1/1-207.html

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Originally posted by out2theblack:
What P-N probably means is that the state-issued Driver's Licanse is not an appropriate instrument on which to make one's preference known...

It would be more appropriate to disclose one's wishes on a document like a Durable Power-Of-Attorney/Living Will...

Not to discount your own experience or viewpoint , but I have heard of M.D.'s who've advised their own loved ones not to check the organ-donor box on the driver's-license contract...Because of the risks of mistakes being made...

One of my best friends and closest associates is an MD , but he has now gone out of private practice and conducts pharmacovigilance for that industry (pharma) and its drug trials...He is pretty reticent on certain subjects 'close to home' , but I'll ask his point-of-view about this subject at next opportunity...

The mobile-execution vans in China are a relatively-recent development , but the mobile vivisection vans are not...They've been around for many years...Nothing like a totalitarian regime to bring new efficiencies and economies to 'health care'...

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US doctor on organ harvest charge

BBC News
31 July 2007

A transplant surgeon in the US has been charged with attempting to hasten the death of a disabled man in order to harvest his organs.
San Francisco-based Dr Hootan Roozrokh, who could face up to eight years in jail if convicted, denies the charges.

He is accused of ordering large amounts of narcotic painkillers and sedatives for a Ruben Navarro, 25, before he was officially declared dead.

Mr Navarro's mother says her son was exploited and did not die with dignity.

Dr Roozrokh is also charged with administering the antiseptic Betadine through a feeding tube into the patient's stomach. That procedure typically takes place once a donor has died.

Prosecutors claim this occurred just after Mr Navarro, who was physically and mentally disabled, was taken off life support. He survived for another seven hours.

The BBC's David Willis, in California, says that with nearly 100,000 people on the national waiting list for organs, the case has raised questions about the ethics of removing a patient from life support simply to retrieve their organs.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6925289.stm

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SERIAL KILLERS > MOST NOTORIOUS = Dr. Harold Shipman

His patients - mainly elderly women - were living alone and vulnerable. They adored their doctor, Harold "Fred" Shipman.

Even when their contemporaries began dying in unusually high numbers, patients remained loyal to the murderous M.D.

For as long as he spared them, his victims loved their doctor — to death.

No film director could plan a grislier scene.

In the dead of a black August night, relentless rains and driving winds formed the perfect backdrop for an exhumation.

But this was no psychological thriller — the Manchester police were observing a real-life drama. Experts were raising the mud-streaked coffin of wealthy Kathleen Grundy.

Interred just 5 weeks earlier in the Hyde cemetery, the 81-year-old ex-mayoress held, in death, the key to solving nearly 400 murders. This would give killer Dr. Harold Shipman the dubious distinction of being the greatest serial murderer the world has ever known.

It puts him well ahead of modern history's most prolific serial killer to date — Pedro ("monster of the Andes") Lopez. Convicted of 57 murders in 1980, Lopez allegedly killed 300 young girls in Colombia.

55-year-old Shipman is already serving 15 consecutive life sentences in Frankland Prison, County Durham, plus four years for forging the will of his last victim, Kathleen Grundy.

Murder Unlimited

The Baker report, noted earlier, is filled with chilling statistics.

When he compared Shipman's patient list with those of doctors with similar lists, Professor Baker concluded that Shipman had 236 more in-home patient deaths than would normally be expected.

Some psychoanalysts speculate he hated older women, citing comments he made about the elderly being a drain on the health system.

Addicted to Killing

Until late July, 2002, Britain's worst serial killer was Victorian serial poisoner, Mary Ann Cotton, who murdered an estimated 21 people in the 1870s. Now that dubious distinction is claimed by Dr. Harold Shipman.

Officially, Dr. Harold Shipman murdered at least 215 of his patients — 171 women and 44 men ranging in age from 41 to 93. After a year-long public inquiry, the 2,000-page report into his 23-year murder spree was released by High Court Judge Dame Janet Smith. The records of nearly 500 patients of Shipman's who died while in his care between 1978 and 1998 were scrutinized in the investigation.

The Final Betrayal

On Tuesday, January 13, 2004 , Dr. Harold Shipman, Britain's worst serial killer, was discovered at 6 a.m. hanging in his prison cell. He apparently committed suicide in Wakefield prison, where he had been incarcerated since June of 2003 after being moved from Durham prison. The 57-year-old physician was serving 15 concurrent life sentences for his murders, beginning in January of 2000. It is estimated that he killed between 215 and 260 patients during his 23-year killing spree.

http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/serial_killers/notorious/shipman/de
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Abortionist accused of eating fetuses

Kansas City clinic closed as grisly house of horrors

WND
June 14, 2005

A Kansas City abortionist is out of business after investigators discovered a grisly house of horrors at his clinic – with fetuses kept in Styrofoam cups in his refrigerator and one employee accusing him of microwaving one and stirring it into his lunch.

http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=44779

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Originally posted by out2theblack:
Codex Alimentarius deserves its own thread...I've been meaning to start one , but haven't yet had sufficient time for it...

Interested folk should watch the Doctor's 'Nutracide' video at youTube , or just research the Codex themselves...

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