No question, most transplants are safe — and necessary. More than 28,000 are performed in the U.S. each year, but 108,000 people need the operations and more than 6,500 die waiting.
As demand for transplants grows, however, concern about safety is rising, too. Many transplant experts are calling for better screening and tracking of donors, even as others worry that extra steps will slow down transplants and risk wasting urgently needed organs.
No one knows how many diseases are transmitted through infected organs, said Dr. Matthew Kuehnert, director of the Office of Blood, Organ and Other Tissue Safety at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The U.S. does not have a national surveillance system in place to monitor disease transmission after donation, and a landmark report last fall suggested that the nation’s periodic monitoring is patchy at best.
The United Network for Organ Sharing, which oversees transplants, began requiring reports of disease transmission in 2004. Since then, they’ve been steadily rising, from seven reports of diseases from donors in 2005 to 152 reports in 2009.