| News From Transplant Week of January 27, 2002 / Vol. 3 No. 4 |
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California Prison Inmate Gets Heart Transplant |
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A two-time felon serving a 14-year sentence for a 1996 robbery has received a heart transplant at Stanford Medical Center, according to California prison officials. "As far as I can tell, this is the first heart transplant in the country for a prison inmate," said Russ Heimerich, spokesman for the California Department of Corrections. In 1995, a federal court ordered California to give a kidney transplant to a prison inmate whose request had previously been denied. "We're not insensitive to the larger issues here," said Heimerich. "There's the whole question of how far should we go for inmate medical care." It certainly is likly to be a growing issue given the large number of prisoners with hepatitis C who are likely to need new livers in the years ahead, said Scott Chavez, a spokesman for the National Commission on Correctional Health Care. The decision to perform the transplant on the 31-year-old inmate was made by a committee of doctors at Stanford, not by the Department of Corrections, officials said. On Jan. 4, one day after the inmate received his new heart, there were 4,119 patients -- including 500 in California -- on the waiting list for a donor heart, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing. Only about half that number of hearts become available for transplant each year. In 1976, the
U.S. Supreme Court ruled that denial of decent medical care to
prisoners violates the constitutional prohibition against cruel
and unusual punishment. The 1995 federal court decision ordering
a kidney transplant was based on that ruling. Other sources: Sacramento Bee, Los Angeles Times |
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