Desperate British Health System Using Smokers’ Lungs in Transplants

(By Jonathon M. Seidl, The Blaze) - What happens in Britain when the list of people needing organs is longer than the list people willing to donate them? The donees get “high risk” organs, like when 28-year-old Lyndsey Scott received the lungs of a 30-a-day smoker and died five months later.

“Desperate transplant patients are being given the lungs of chain smokers because the NHS is so short of organ donations,” London’s Daily Mail reports. “Surgeons are also being forced to use diseased body parts from cancer sufferers, drug addicts and the very elderly.”

The newspaper also reports that doctors are using tissue from those more at risk of carrying HIV and Hepatitis C, “such as gay men and drug users.”