Not dead yet

I WONDER if stroke patient Jimi Fritze’s narrow escape from having his organs taken, while he was still alive and listening to the discussion, (Mail) will spark a much-needed lifting of the lid on the criteria for defining death.

Before people are urged to make their own or their relatives’ organs available after death, they have a right to know what may be involved.

The ‘ beating heart cadaver’ is certainly dead after the operation to harvest its vital organs. Was it dead before if, as often happens, anaesthesia and muscular paralysis are deemed necessary for the evisceration?

The scarcity of donor organs a pparently t r umps all o t her considerations.

An experienced GP whom I have known si nce his student days scrapped his Organ Donor Card once he saw what went on. He surmised that the ‘ nearly dead’ conveniently died when the operating theatre was ready for extraction of the organs.

I’m not ignorant of the plight of those hoping for an organ transplant. I have already happily passed on my left kidney to some grateful stranger on the renal waiting list. But such simple goodwill gestures might evaporate if Westminster follows Wales with an ‘ opt- out’ scheme for registering ‘donors’.

If our bodies are regarded as mere collections of potential spare parts that belong to the NHS, we cease to be organ donors at all.

WENDY WRIGHT, Guildford, Surrey.