By Eileen Buckley
Buffalo, NY – A 17-year-old North Carolina girl under went a second transplant operation in a month on Thursday. Her body rejected the first set of heart and lungs because they were the wrong blood type. But Upstate New York Transplant Services says the public needs to understand that organ transplants are a last resort for patients after no other medical therapies are available.
Known as UNYTS, the local agency coordinates the donation of organs across the Western New York region. Director of Organ Recovery Services, Edward Kraus, says every "conceivable contingency" is taken to avoid what happened in North Carolina.
"You may have a critically ill patient of an incompatible blood type, who obviously can't receive that organ, but there is always a patient of the appropriate blood type waiting right behind that," Kraus said.
Kraus says any time there is negative publicity surrounding transplant surgery it makes their efforts in seeking organ donations more difficult.
"We constantly are working to improve public confidence, not only in the ability in medical science to accomplish these miracles, but more importantly to convince people that this is tremendously noble thing to do at the end of one's life," Kraus continued.
Kraus says more than 80,000 people across the US are waiting for an organ transplant -- ten percent are in New York State. But with thousands of patients on transplant lists, how was it possible for the North Carolina teen to receive a second set of organs so quickly?
"When you have a re-transplant patient that is critically ill, in the whole point system of the waiting list, that patient would receive the highest priority," Kraus explained. "They in effect move to the top of the list, because obviously there is no other alternative to saving that patients life, and to finding replacement organs."
Kraus says unfortunately about 7,000 people died waiting for transplants last year.