EXPLANTS,TRANSPLANTS - THE NEW BONANZA
THE AIM: MAKING OF EVERY EARTHLING A MEDICO-DEPENDENT
Another CIVIS ally we are proud of is making headlines in Italy, accusing the State-controlled Medical Establishment of criminal conduct.A news agency dispatch of 3 May 1995 was titled "Will the Case of Nicholas Green come up in Court?" It reported that the Public Prosecutor of Bergamo had indicted for defamation Nerina Negrello, founder of the League Against the Prelation of Organs and Death With Beating Heart at the request of Senator Valentino Martelli, who is also a cardiac surgeon.
What had angered the senator-surgeon was a newspaper article by Negrello that had started a nationwide and still sizzling controversy when it appeared in October 1994 in the daily of the prosperous North-Italian town of Bergamo. It read:
"Nicholas has been hit in the head by bandits. Thirty-six hours later, at 11:30 of Saturday, Nicholas is declared "brain dead". On Saturday Nicholas is killed by explant. The press reported: "No attempt for a surgical intervention to remove the bullet could be made." Why haven't they tried? Because they feared that the heart might stop beating and they could then no longer explant the organ. We claim that Nicholas has not been cured, no diagnosis was made, he got no adequate treatment.Nerino Negrello (who for more than a decade has been fighting the practise of using explants from patients whose hearts are still beating) inundated the Italian press with articles about what is known in Italy as the Nicholas Case. She wrote: "Under shock, the Green couple, refusing to think of their beloved Nicholas as dead, were persuaded to donate him to experimenters who assured them that their boy's organs would survive in ailing patients, thus saving their lives, so that their boy's death would not have been in vain."If the doctors had told Nicholas' parents the truth, they would never have donated their child to be cut to pieces. What truth? That Harvard University (Boston), in the document "Rethinking Brain Death" [Critical Care Medicine:1992] had claimed that there exist no instruments capable of demonstrating the irreversible "cessation" of all the functions of the brain, so that the Article One of Italian law (L.578/93) and the Costa Decree of 22 August, 1994 lack any scientific fundament. Nicholas Green has been killed by explant. Professor Reginald Green, Nicholas' father, will receive the document of the Harvard School, and will then realize that his son was wounded by bandits but killed by doctors/surgeons of the transplant apparatus."
In fact, immense publicity was given for days by the Italian press to the American couple's "generous gesture" of "donating" their son's organs to save Italian lives, propagandizing the need and benefits of organ transplantation, as early after the "death" of the donor as possible: in fact, while the heart is still beating.
And the propaganda in favor of donations was revived and reached new heights when the American couple returned to Italy a year later to meet allegedly the five happy and grateful individuals in whom their child's organs were suriving. Heated by the media, a paroxism of "donating" fever seemed to get hold of the nation. The people were encouraged by the press and the medical establishment to sign their consent to the prevelation of their organs in case of death by sudden accident, and even schoolchildren wrote letters to the editor to that effect.
The transplant lobby went them one better. They elaborated a bill that would permit the withdrawal of organs from any body that doctors declared to be "dead", even if the heart was still beating, as in the case of the Nicholas boy. That's when Nerina Negrello got really mad. She was not the only one. A senior surgeon of Rome, Massimo Bondi, gathered many colleagues who thought Negrello was right.
The controversy became grotesque last Christmas time, when well-organized hordes of alleged kidney patients on dialysis and on waiting lists for transplants, demonstrating before Parliament, managed to send several members of the large police force in full riot equipment, sent out to battle them, to the hospital. "Those dialyses seem to work quite well," cracked Nerina Negrello.
DR.H.M.PAPWORTH
Wrote H.M.Papworth, in his Human Guinea Pigs classic (1969), which, just like Slaughter of the Innocents is proving itself more and more prophetic with every passing day.
"The public is being misled into believing that the problem of rejection has been solved or will be solved in the very near future. This is wishful thinking. The public should know that transplant surgery never cures the original disease and never makes the recipient into a healthy person. No organ of the body exists in complete isolation, independent of other organs. For example, a patient who undergoes a heart transplant because of coronary heart disease is likely to have incipient vascular disease of other organs such as the kidneys. All transplant surgery is a confession of failure, of unsuccessful early diagnosis and treatment. Would it not be wiser to spend the energy and money involved on research into the early diagnosis, prevention and better treatment of disease.?"PS: The day after closing this chapter, on 17 February 1996, we read the news that Gary Dockery, a 42-year-old former policeman from Chattanooga, Tennessee, who had been shot in the head seven and a half years earlier, had unexpectedly come out of his vegetative state.Why I can no longer work at Papworth