Transforming ICU death into life—radically more

Excerpt

Modern intensive care saves increasingly more people and yet there is so much death in the ICU; for a lot of people (in the developed world at least) this is a common place to die these days. An estimated one in five deaths in the USA occurs in a critical care bed [1]. What if we transformed all (or many more) of those deaths into new promises for life? There are currently 121,650 people needing a lifesaving organ transplant in the USA with 22 patients per day dying on the waiting list [2]. This number likely substantially underestimates the problem since a large number of patients are arbitrarily excluded from waiting lists. Even larger numbers remain on long-term dialysis. The demand is also rising, because of the increasing burden of certain types of organ failure (e.g., due to diabetes), and widening eligibility criteria for transplants. …