[classicman]

Maybe this should go in the WTF thread.

Woman died after being given smoker's lungs

The Government's "transplant tsar" insisted today that organ transplants were carried out on the basis of whether they would work - after it emerged that a cystic fibrosis sufferer died after receiving the lungs of a long-term smoker.

Chris Rudge, national clinical director for transplantation, said smoking was not the "issue" in the case of cystic fibrosis sufferer Lyndsey Scott, whose family have lodged a complaint after she received a double lung transplant from a 30-year smoker.

The 28-year-old, from Wigan, underwent the double transplant at Wythenshawe Hospital in Manchester in January last year and died in the July from pneumonia.

Her family have said they were not told that the donor smoked - and she would have been "horrified" to discover the organs were from a smoker of 30 years.

Mr Rudge, who said he did not know the "full details" of the case, and was speaking more generally, insisted that it mattered "far more" if lungs were working properly than if they were from a smoker.

"Lungs from a smoker can be working perfectly normally and be perfectly suitable for transplantation lungs from a non-smoker can not be working and not be suitable for transplantation," he told BBC Breakfast.

"Surgeons have to make decisions - about four out of every five lungs that become available for transplantation are not used because they are not working well enough.

"It is nothing to do with the history of the donor, it is whether the organ is working or not, whether it is going to produce a successful transplant or not, and, in this particular case, smoking isn't the issue."

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I would have never imagined that a smokers lungs, nor a drinkers liver would be accepted for transplant.