"Scuse me, dead guy? Thanks for signing your donor card. By the way, how many ladies have you shagged this year?"

Farkers will make excellent candidates, but I wouldn't want their organs.

Just 2? I am no casanova and I do more than 2 a year. That's ridiculously low.

Mugato: Oh I see, you're doing that "monogamy thing". That's cool.

We can't all be dirty, filthy, reeking, disease-riddled sluts like you.

Unfortunately.

Mitochondrial Eve: Farkers will make excellent candidates, but I wouldn't want their organs.

They're probably well preserved...

Pickled, even

Pants full of macaroni!!: Looks like I'm gonna be a very sought-after organ donor.

/forever-alone.jpg

You might get more action if you took the macaroni out of your pants.

/just sayin'

Hopes to be disqualified...



If I'm dead, I don't care if use my organs or burn them with the rest of my carcass.
If I need an organ, I don't care how many people you've shagged.

I guess that excludes CDC employees.

Did that news story about the CDC executive ever make fark?

Her partners included a six year old boy and pets.

Nasty

Because someone waiting on an organ would rather die than get an organ from someone with three sexual partners in a year.

No, but trust me you still wouldn't want them.

Are they going to require you to get your donor card signed and dated by your partners? People who are donating organs are unlikely to be doing much talking.

Yeah, a living donor could be asked, but in those circumstances I'd think there would be time for a thorough panel of tests.

Demetrius: Here's a plan, CDC. Test the blood of the people before you allow them to donate their organs. Pretty simple.

I don't think testing someone's organs a few months/years before they're donated accomplishes much. Tests would rule out some people for donations, but it couldn't ensure they'd be good to go when the time came. Having to go through tests at the time would probably discourage a lot of people signing the organ donor card as well.

My guess is that the biggest problem is getting results from various tests in the limited time between when a organ is taken from one person and put into another.

Holy shiat, I never thought that I, in any circumstances ever, would have been considered to have had "too many sex partners".

This has been an ego boost for me

A brilliant plan by the CDC to harvest more organs: everyone who isn't farking at least two people a year will have that much more reason to commit suicide, after all, their organs are highly in demand!

FitzShivering: Because someone waiting on an organ would rather die than get an organ from someone with three sexual partners in a year.

No shiat. If I was on my deathbed and needed a liver and the crackhead tranny blowing truckers for dimebags was my only match, I'd roll the dice.

Why is this under the Geek tab? I don't think the article applies.

So ummmm you need a new heart and we figured you've got about two weeks to live... maybe less - now that dead dude that just came in the ER from the traffic accident on the freeway is a spot on match but we have it on good authority he may have had sex with 3 women this year and we'd HATE for you to have to live for decades on HIV supression drugs if you just happent to get some disease from that heart.....sooooo..... guess you should probably kiss your ass goodbye.... but at least you wont have AIDS, so there's always that....


/vote Quimby!

Well that wouldn't be a problem...

/sigh

Lou Brown: Demetrius: Here's a plan, CDC. Test the blood of the people before you allow them to donate their organs. Pretty simple.

I don't think testing someone's organs a few months/years before they're donated accomplishes much. Tests would rule out some people for donations, but it couldn't ensure they'd be good to go when the time came. Having to go through tests at the time would probably discourage a lot of people signing the organ donor card as well.

My guess is that the biggest problem is getting results from various tests in the limited time between when a organ is taken from one person and put into another.

Forget years... even testing the day of donorship does not 100%guarantee anything.... If that person had recently acquired the HIV virus, the body doesn't start creating the detectable antibodies until probably 3 weeks later.

This is all part of a nefarious plan to have all of us tissue typed. Once they do that people will be disappeared to be harvested for organs to the rich and powerful.

I've got a friend who is a chaplain at a hospital, and a routine part of his job is approaching dying patients and their families about organ donation.

Here's the problem: there's a very small window in which organs are harvestable. Once harvested, there is no time to do tests. A heart, for example, only stays viable for 4-6 hours after being harvested. That means that it has to get from the donor to the donee within that time period or the heart tissue dies. Other organs stay longer, (and I'm not an expert) but I think the upper limit is something like 36 hours.

The way doctors determine eligibility for donation is through medical histories. Some diseases and conditions will prevent someone from being an organ donor, but there are a wide range of conditions that will prohibit some organs from being donated but not others. Some tissues, such as skin and eye tissue, is very resilient. Others aren't. Essentially, the doctor will feed a donor's medical history through a database that's able to determine exactly what that patient is eligible to donate.

When you're discriminating people based off of medical history what you're really doing is making a statistical judgement call. You're saying that given disease X and behavior Y, there's a high probability that this organ in this person will not be suitable for transplant.

The sticking point, then, is that sex is a high risk behavior. Something like 1/4 of all adult Americans have an STD. Lots of those STDs are transmitted by contact through bodily fluids or through blood, meaning that an organ carried by a person with an STD is probably also infected with that STD.

You might ask why that makes a difference? What does it matter if someone who needs a heart or a lung also gets (for example) herpes from a donation? Isn't the choice then between herpes and death? The issue is that if someone in a position where they need an organ transplant to keep them alive then the odds are that they're extremely sick to begin with... so giving them something benign as herpes might be a serious complication. On top of that, the anti-rejection drugs that are used after transplant operations are essentially immune-system supressants, meaning that if you give someone an organ with a viral or bacterial infection their body will have virtually no defense.

Again, I'm not an expert. It's true, however, that sex is biologically a risky behavior for infection, and that people who get transplants are immuno-compromised. In this situation even benign conditions can cause serious complications or death- and that's why the CDC has made this change. It's not about condemning people who have sex with multiple partners, it's about ensuring that transplant recipients survive their ordeal.

This is a high-risk organ

Thanks, Doc. Say, listen, what's my risk without the organ again? Right, that's what I thought. Now STFU and gimme.

Hmmmm.... do hands qualify as "partners"?

Biological Ali: Transplant recipients not surviving are just one half of the equation - the other half, of course, being the patients who didn't survive because they weren't able to receive an organ donation at all. Playing the odds on who gets to donate in the manner you've described would, of course, make perfect sense if you had a surplus of donated organs (or at least, if the shortfall between demand and supply was very low). When you're faced with a shortage of donated organs, on the other hand, the same math doesn't quite work (assuming your goal is to save as many people as possible, as opposed to some other unspecified objective).

You're right, if the only number you're looking at is the number of people who get organs. But there are lots of issues beyond that.

One aspect of the decision: transplant surgery is extraordinarily expensive. Would you bet $500,000 on a 50/50 shot at survival, knowing that your family is going to be stuck with the bill no matter what happens to you? Do you, as a taxpayer, want to pay for someone else's $500,000 surgery if they only have a 50% chance of coming out of it alive?

Keep in mind that even successful transplant patients live a drastically different life- you're on immunosupressants so you can't go out much. You have to see a doctor regularly for years (if not the rest of your life). Your physical ability will be severely limited for years (if not the rest of your life).

Monogamous for 22 years and an organ donor. You're welcome.

Biological Ali: Look at it this way: patients are already trusted to make their own decisions in all sorts of medical procedures that could have all sorts of outcomes, including major complications that require expensive ongoing treatment or even outright death. Why should the issue of organ donation be any different?

It takes an incredible amount of resources to do an organ donation, and we only have a finite medical capacity. Whenever a doctor or hospital commits to doing a transplant they're taking that opportunity away from someone else who might need it, so they have to be very judicious in their use of resources. Nurses, doctors, specialists, operating room time, the drugs, the instruments, recovery ward time, the time it takes doctors and nurses to follow up on the patient, plus all of the recurring visits that patient will make for years to come.

Doctors already do exclude entire classes of decisions from their patients. Doctors are the ones that decide whether or not you're eligible to receive a transplant. Doctors are the ones that decide whether your'e healthy enough to perform a live donation. Doctors are the ones that decide whether your organs are healthy enough to be given away.

As I said before: they're not just concerned with getting as many organs transplanted as possible: they're out to do the most positive good with the limited resources they have. Maybe my model assumes we have more organs than we can use (we don't) but your model assumes we have more doctors and hospital beds than we can use (we don't).

I think the real reason people are up in arms about this is because they feel there's an implicit judgement being made on their lifestyle. There isn't. It's a statistical risk assessment.

Just to provide concrete numbers:



Organ transplantation is extremely risky, and you never "get better".

Ha! Organ donor and I've had more than two partners in the last year. Even in death I will ruin/take your life!!

/Disease free
//for now

They already do this kind of shiat for blood. Why the hell wouldn't they do it for organs?

Also, don't gimme no lines.