About DLRM

News & Campaigns
- Toxicity
- Research
- Press Releases

Resources

Contact Us

Join us

Home

POSITION STATMENT IN RESPONSE TO THE MEDIA ANNOUNCEMENTS ON THE CLONING OF PIGS INTENDED TO PROVIDE ORGANS FOR TRANSPLANTATION INTO HUMAN BEINGS

March 16, 2000

Doctors and Lawyers for Responsible Medicine (DLRM) remain steadfast in their call for a ban on animal-to-human organ transplants (xenotransplantation), based on the following:

1. There is still no convincing scientific evidence to indicate that the problem of animal organ rejection in human patients is about to be solved. Indeed, all of the animal-to-human solid organ transplants to date have been a dismal failure.
2. From a public health perspective, xenotranplantation represents a virologist's nightmare. Transplanting a living animal organ teeming with micro-organisms, into the human body, and thus bypassing the body's natural defence mechanisms, is equivalent to injecting a massive dose of viruses directly into the body. All that is required to produce a new epidemic (like AIDS) is just ONE successful transmission of a disease-causing virus from animal to man.
3. The UKXIRA (Xenotranplantation Interim Regulatory Authority), which is the government appointed advisory committee studying the subject, does not have on it a single representative of a patients' rights or a consumer protection organisation.
4. The UK public has heard no mention of what would happen to a person who became infected as a result of an animal organ transplant, in terms of medical insurance. Would persons infected in this way be covered by national medical insurance, or would they be in the same sad situation as the thalidomide victims of the sixties, who had to challenge the pharmaceutical manufacturer in court?
5. Too little attention has been paid to alternative solutions to the human organ shortage. These include the wider use of living donors (e.g. 45% living kidney donations in Norway, compared to only 5-10% in the UK), the use of artificial part-organs (e.g. hearts), and even diets which have been proven to reverse advanced cases of heart disease.

Ends