Health Tips

Is donating bone marrow more like giving blood or a kidney?

According to the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, it’s the former. The court ruled today in favor of plaintiffs including a California nonprofit, MoreMarrowDonors.org, that planned a pilot project to offer incentives such as a $3,000 charitable gift or scholarship to help sway more people to donate. (We wrote about compensating bone-marrow donors last year.)

As the WSJ’s Law Blog writes, those plans conflicted with the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984, which made it illegal to sell organs such as a kidney or liver — and put bone marrow in the same bucket.

Yet the plaintiffs in the case, including some cancer survivors, argued that technology has changed to make bone-marrow donation far more akin to donating blood or sperm (for which compensation is allowed) than having major surgery to extract all or part of an organ.

A three-judge panel agreed, noting that while marrow used to be extracted from donors’ bones via long needles inserted in the hip (“a painful, unpleasant procedure for the donor,” requiring hospitalization and anesthesia), now two-thirds of marrow donations use a far less invasive procedure.

As described by the National Cancer Institute, peripheral blood stem cells are harvested from the bloodstream using a four- to six-hour process called apheresis. Donors take a stem-cell boosting medication for several days before the procedure, then have blood withdrawn through a vein and filtered through a machine that removes the key cells.

“Once the stem cells are in the bloodstream, they are a ‘subpart’ of the blood, not the bone marrow,” wrote Judge Andrew J. Kleinfeld, on behalf of the panel. So as long as apheresis is used, donation can be compensated, the decision says.

However, the Law Blog notes that the court refused to invalidate the law, and that compensating donors for kidneys, livers and the like remains illegal. Still, some have proposed paying donors or their families even for those organs, arguing too many people die waiting for transplants.

A DOJ spokesman tells the Health Blog the department is reviewing the decision.

Image: iStockphoto

from: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/wsj/health/feed/~3/QhQ-MHhpeDA/

WASHINGTON—Bipartisan success stories are about as rare in Washington as unicorns, but evangelicals, gay activists, Republicans, and Democrats gathered Thursday to celebrate one success story together: the United States’ fight against global AIDS.

President Obama spoke at an event commemorating World AIDS Day at George Washington University, joined by African health workers, Bush administration advisers, Bono, Alicia Keys, Saddleback Church’s Kay Warren, Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, and Democratic Rep. Barbara Lee.

“The fight’s not over. Not by a long shot,” Obama said at the gathering. “This is a global fight which America must continue to lead.” … MORE >>

Read Emily Belz’s complete Web Extra report.

from: http://online.worldmag.com/2011/12/01/bipartisan-celebration/

Good advice from Popehat

Hence, the government’s chickenshit false statement trap works — even though the government agents set it up from the start. Now, however weak or strong their evidence is of the issue they are investigating, they’ve got you on a Section 1001 charge — a federal felony. In effect, they are manufacturing felonies in the course of investigations.

You think this is an improbable scenario? You think I’m talking about rare and extreme cases to color the entirety of federal law enforcement? To the contrary, as a federal defense attorney, I’m encountering this more and more often. Not to sound like an old fart, but we never indulged in such bullshit when I was a federal prosecutor (cue the scoffing from many defense attorneys). But in the last 12 years, I’ve seen it in a dozen cases, and heard about it from colleagues across the country. It’s now routine for federal agents to close out an investigation with a false-statement-trap interview of a target in an effort to add a Section 1001 cherry to the top of the cake.

The lesson — other than that criminal justice often has little to do with actual justice — is this: for God’s sake shut up. Law enforcement agents seeking to interview you are not your friends. You cannot count on “just clearing this one thing up.” Demand to talk to a lawyer before talking to the cops. Every time.

Read it all.  He explains how easy it is to fall into this trap, and how even non-material statements get spun as felonies.   Remember, Martha Stewart went to the slammer for lying to investigators, not for stock fraud or insider trading.

from: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/CoyoteBlog/~3/7v2foLbuCeE/shut-up.html