Organ Scandals Have Hit Research
Posted on: Friday, 12 August 2005, 09:00 CDT
SCANDALS in the UK involving the retention of children's organs by hospitals led to a fall in donations for proper ethical research, a new study reveals.
There was widespread outrage after it emerged in 1999 that some hospitals, including Alder Hey Children's Hospital in Liverpool, had kept thousands of youngster's organs without the knowledge of their families.
As a result legitimate medical research has been hampered due to a fall in tissue being donated, according to researchers in the British Medical Journal. They said that registrations of tumour samples in the national children's tumour bank, established by the UK Children Cancer Study Group in 1998, fell during the height of the organ retention controversy.
The samples are taken during procedures to diagnose and treat cancer after consent is granted by the families, and are then used by researchers in studies to help improve cancer treatments.
Researchers from a number of universities and the Institute of Cancer Research looked at newspaper coverage on the subject of tissue retention and donation.
They said that the public may have become confused about the difference between organ retention and donation, and between organ retention and donations of tissue samples given with consent.
Dr Mary DixonWoods, from the University of Leicester, said: 'The organ retention story affected everything to do with use of children's tissues, even things that had nothing to do with organ retention
Source: Daily Post; Liverpool
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