Tuesday, July 9, 2013

Please Tell Me That This Horror Story Is One In A Million

It was exactly midnight when Caroline Burns eerily opened her eyes and looked at the operating lights above her, shocking doctors who believed she was dead and were about to remove her organs and donate them to patients on the transplant waiting list.
The Syracuse Post-Standard unearthed a report from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that chronicled the series of errors that led to the near-organ removal on a living patient at St. Joseph's Hospital Health Center in Syracuse, N.Y., in 2009.
Those of you who have read many of Larry Niven's short stories from the 1960s and 1970s will recall that in a not too distant future U.S. (about now, actually), criminals are parted out for their organs, much like China has been doing for many years.  Of course, demand for organs for transplants becomes so extreme that all sorts of serious crimes because capital, like jaywalking.

1 comment:

  1. I had hoped things had improved since the days when a wake was held so that they could be sure the supposedly deceased was really dead. Now I'm not so sure...

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