Organ Transplant Mishaps - Kidney Ends Up in Trash

By Mohamed Taki - Medical Research Editor | September 10th, 2012

The last place an organ transplant patient wants to find out is his donor’s organ ended up in trash!

A gross human error committed by an Ohio nurse have prompted the University of Toledo Medical Center to temporarily suspend its organ transplant program, in what medical officials described as a “rare accident.”

“We cannot fathom the disappointment that those impacted have experienced over the course of the last week. The University cannot begin to express the sorrow that we feel that this unfortunate incident occurred. We apologize sincerely,” Dr. Jeffery P. Gold, University of Toledo chancellor and dean of the College of Medicine, said in a statement.

Doctors tried for two hours to resuscitate the organ but it was too late to save the kidney and rendered unusable.

The man who donated the kidney and the intended recipient, his sister, were discharged from the medical center following the incident. The hospital didn’t identify the family or whether the sister has received a different kidney transplant.

Types of common problems that may lead to unsuccessful organ transplants include an unexpected donor disease transmission, organ rejection or death of living donor—but a kidney mistakenly misplaced in trash is an uncommon occurrence in the organ transplantation medical field.

"Somehow, some way, an inexplicable human error made someone think that the kidney apparently was already in the recipient body when it was not," the University of Toledo Medical Center president, Dr. Lloyd Jacobs, told The Blade Newspaper in Toledo.

The University of Toledo Medical Center is a renowned organ transplant center in Ohio which performed more than 1,700 renal transplants since its inception in 1972 with a 98 percent success rate, according to the hospital.

In 2011, UTMC carried out 16 living-donor kidney transplants and 37 deceased-donor transplants.

Health officials at the hospital are investigating the incident and taking serious measures to prevent such an accident from happening again.

The Future of Medicine: Donor-Less Organ Transplants:

Advanced technology and scientific research are finding new medical methods to rely less on human organ transplantation, which will make blunders like kidney-trashing a thing of the past.

Donor-less organ transplants can be a welcoming reality saving patients from finding a matching donor and enduring long waiting times.

In the new future, stem-cell technology may allow doctors to grow organs from the patient’s own stem cells, eliminating the need for a living donor or risk of organ rejection.

Organ transplant procedure is a vital, life-saving option if one or more of body organs are failing due to disease. The most common organ transplant types are the liver (liver transplant), heart, bone marrow (bone marrow transplant), lungs and small intestine.

There were 16,816 kidney transplants nationwide last year from live donors and from those who consented to organ donation through state registries should they die from an illness or accident, according to The Blade.

To learn more about organ transplantation procedures, contact an organ transplant surgeon near you.