Death of organ donor puts program on hold

Transplant surgeons around the country are stepping back to try to prevent this tragedy from being repeated.

By Victoria Stagg Elliott, AMNews staff. April 8, 2002.

Like most living organ donors, Mike Hurewitz, a New York man who in January donated part of his liver to his brother, went into the hospital healthy. But unlike most people in this select patient population, he didn't go home -- at all.

His death has triggered significant introspection within the transplant community.

Was Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City too aggressive about its living donor program? Was the donor medically suitable to undergo the surgery? Was he too old? Did he understand all the risks? Was this death unavoidable -- a statistical inevitability because of the high number of living donor transplants performed at the center? What is the acceptable level of risk when you perform surgery on a healthy person?

These are the questions that medical ethicists, transplant surgeons and those involved in organ procurement are now asking.

"It's a sobering event," said Mark Fox, MD, PhD, director of the program on transplant ethics and policy at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York.

"Given that a high quality program had a tragic outcome like this, it really ought to make everyone stop and think."

Mike Hurewitz is not the first living donor to suffer above and beyond the recovery period. But his case is getting a lot of attention for several reasons. Among them, the surgery was performed at one of the largest transplant centers in the country. Mount Sinai has performed 174 living donor liver transplants since 1988, more than 10% of the total performed nationwide during that time period. [...]