Teen's Donated Organs Spread Cancer to Four Recipients, Killing Two

[bijou]

The family of a 15-year-old New York boy thought they were helping him to live on by donating his organs.

Instead, the organs spread a rare, undiagnosed cancer to the four transplant recipients, according to a report from WCBSTV.com.

Alex Koehne of Sag Harbor, Long Island, died a year ago of lymphoma, but his parents were told he died from bacterial meningitis. Since then, two of the organ recipients have died and two others are battling the same disease, according to the report.

Jim and Lisa Koehne asked for an autopsy following their son's death, according to the report. A month later they found out Alex actually had died of a rare lymphoma; the organs, however, already had been donated.

...

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,344232,00.html

This is such a sad story all round.  Hope the two survivors can beat the cancer.

[guest]

How the heck does something like that happen?  They should be doing a more thorough check of all donors and the organs donated.  I know they are needed desperately, but this could have been prevented. 

I see it was undiagnosed.   


Sad all around for all parties involved.     I hope that changes are made in checking all donated tissues/organs before they are transplanted to someone else.

[Wretched Excess]

ok, that is horrifying.

[Lord Undies]

This is certainly a horrible situation.  I think we can be thankful it such a rare occurrence. 

All medical arts are a gamble.  We live in very fortunate times to even be able to suffer this unusual but tragic side effect.

[stickyboot]

This is certainly a horrible situation.  I think we can be thankful it such a rare occurrence. 

All medical arts are a gamble.  We live in very fortunate times to even be able to suffer this unusual but tragic side effect.

You know, there are those who point to this as another argument against medical trans-anything. I wouldn't go quite that far (I KNOW I'd donate my child's organs to honor them, or gladly accept whatever I believed necessary to help them survive), but it does give me pause thinking about the risks we sometimes don't even know we're taking in our attempts to "play God."

I pray that the remaining recipients have every good opportunity to recover, and that the families of the donor and the lost recipients will eventually find comfort in knowing they all did what they knew was, without question, the loving thing to do.