Submitted by Joan Lando, Sep 6, 2007 12:25

I was surprised that no mention was made in this article about the FDA approved, Medicare funded therapies that are well over 90% effective in making any healthy willing living donor, family, friend, etc., a match to the person who needs a kidney to live off dialysis. Cedars-Sinair High Dose IVIG protocol prevents the patients immune system from rejecting any new kidney for reasons of blood type (ABO Incompatible) or because the recipient has high antibody levels--about 30% of the people on the waiting list--at lease 25,000 people are in this catagory. Johns-Hopkins protocol uses plasmapheresis and IVIG to match willing living donors who step forward to offer a kidney. This protocol is also well over 90% effective in allowing a transplant to go forward no matter blood type or tissue match. The Mayo Clinic uses both protocols as do a few other major transplant center. Most people have willing living donors who have been rejected by their transplant centers for reasons of different blood type or incompatible tissue match. Those barriers no longer exist at Cedars-Sinair, Johns-Hopkins, and the Mayor Clinic and a few others. This group of willing donors who are being rejected because the high volume transplant centers don't bother to use these protocols because they haven't learned how to do it and it costs a little more are condemning people with living donors to a slow, gruesome death on a dialysis machine. Google Dr. Stanley Jordan (Cedars) and Dr. Robert Montgomery (Hopkins) for information and links to medical journal articles. This outrage is the real news story.

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