UK Farms Human Livers, Germany Harvest Funny Bones

IF you could choose a liver door from any country on Earth, which nation would you harvest organs from?

Those living on the Japanese island of Okinawa, the small Sardinian mountain town of Ovodda and Loma Linda in the US are the world’s longest living. So any of them would be top of most people’s lists.

So listen up as David Mayer, chairman of UK Transplant’s Liver Advisory Group, says:

“If we were to provide livers for the world from the UK, then UK patients would be enormously disadvantaged.”

Well, yes. We would have no livers, ours being a nation of some 60million, and the rest of the world having far more bodies to fill with offal. And what with our binge drinking, you’d think the demand just wouldn’t be there. The UK as the world’s liver farming would be like the Germans farming funny bones.

But here’s Professor Nigel Heaton, head of the transplant unit at King’s College Hospital, London, transplanting part of an adult British liver into a boy from one of the Gulf states.

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Posted: 5th, October 2008 | In: Broadsheets | Comments (6)