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Donation after Cardiac Death: Conceptual Ambiguity and Public Trust
Donation After Cardiac Death Click here for full commentary
Sandra Woien, PhD
The pediatric heart transplant team at the Children’s Hospital in Denver, Colorado recently published an article describing cases in which the hearts of three infants who were declared dead using
the cardiac death criteria were transplanted into three different infant recipients (Boucek et al, 2008). In spite of the ethical issues raised by such a novel procedure, the authors of the article deserve accolades in bringing these cases to the public’s attention, and the recent flurry of debate regarding the novel donation after cardiac death (DCD) procedure offers a unique opportunity to make the practice of controlled DCD more transparency.