Monday, March 3, 2008

Location, location, location.

It's the punchline to an old joke, but this time it's deadly serious. According to a recent article in Pediatrics (summary; abstract here - full text here), "Black babies with very low birth weights are nearly twice as likely as their white counterparts to be born at New York City hospitals with high risk-adjusted neonatal death rates." The first and last paragraphs of the article's Discussion

Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Donation after cardiac death and the LA story

The papers are all over yesterday's story about the prosecution of a young surgeon in Los Angeles who is accused of hastening a patient's death (or, to be less circumspect but at least as accurate about it, of killing a patient) in order to procure organs for transplant. Here's how the New York Times' front-page story begins:On a winter night in 2006, a disabled and brain damaged man named Ruben

Sunday, February 24, 2008

Organ donation, transplant discussed on NPR

Weekend Edition - Sunday had a very fine segment this morning on organ donation.Given what they were trying to do with this piece, there probably wasn't time to portray the personal impact of donating and receiving, convey some of the statistics about the various waiting lists, provide a brief overview of some of the evolving strategies for increasing organ yields, AND discuss some of the