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According to the United Network for Organ Sharing, known as UNOS, more than 100,000 people are waiting for an organ transplant in the United States.

“I was born type 1 diabetic,” said Patrick McGlone, who received a double kidney-pancreas transplant in June 2021. “The word transplant was always thrown around.

Due to the lack of organs, there can be long waiting times. According to the UNOS, just over 50% of people waiting for an organ will receive one within five years.

UNOS is a private, not-for-profit organization that compiles all clinical information for candidates in the United States who need a transplant on what they call their computer waiting list. Since 1986, it has been handling the government order to process the organ donation process and coordinates with all other agencies involved.

The US organ donation system is designed to save as many lives as possible without wasting organs, but there are inequalities within the system that raise questions of fairness.

People of color, people with lower socioeconomic status, and women receive transplants at lower rates than the general population and are also more likely to wait longer for an organ than patients with similar medical conditions.

“The biggest equity challenge with transplantation is the same as with all of America’s healthcare system: getting it into the hospital at all,” said Brian Shepard, a former CEO of UNOS. “Transplantation is not immune to these injustices.”

“I think a lot of people think about organ transplants and they’re like, oh, that’s a problem for older people,” said Arthur Caplan, director of the department of medical ethics at NYU Grossman School of Medicine. “If you increase the number of transplants we do, you can have a much more productive workforce. It saves money. … So it’s a paperback problem for all of us.”

“It’s weird to say I saved money from the surgery,” McGlone said. “Diabetes care, between the supplies and the constant visits and the lab work and all the things you have to do. There are a lot [out-of-pocket costs] even with good insurance.”

The industry recognizes the importance of finding alternatives to using organs from deceased human donors to address the national shortage. One method is to encourage kidney donation from living donors.

“People have different opinions on this, but honestly it’s been the easiest process for me and everyone,” said Katharine Manor, who donated her kidney on behalf of her mentor. “It was really easy for me.”

“You might think we could campaign and encourage more people to do it, and you can,” Caplan said. “But the reality is most of us sitting around aren’t going to give a kidney to anyone we don’t know. It’s a big deal.”

Research is currently underway into using animal organs such as pigs, as well as building mechanical organs, to try to make up for the scarcity.

“Although we’re all fascinated by transplants, the ultimate goal is to get rid of them,” Caplan said. “What you want to do is either repair through cell engineering or artificial organs that can simply replace the failing natural organs.”

Watch them Video above to learn more about how the organ transplant system works and what we can do to increase supply while addressing inequalities.

A patient undergoes a coronavirus disease (COVID-19) test on December 27, 2021 at Sparrow Laboratories Drive-Thru Services in Lansing, Michigan.

Emily Elconin | Reuters

People who got mild cases of Covid-19 in the first year of the pandemic were at a higher risk of developing blood clots than those who were not infected, according to a major study published this week by British scientists.

Patients with mild Covid, defined as those who were not hospitalized, were 2.7 times more likely to develop blood clots, according to the study published in the British Medical Journal’s Heart on Monday. They were also ten times more likely to die than people without Covid.

Scientists from Queen Mary University of London tracked 18,000 people who contracted Covid in the first year of the pandemic and compared their health outcomes to nearly 34,000 people who did not contract the virus.

Participants were followed until they developed cardiovascular disease, died, or until the study ended in March 2021. Most of the study was conducted before the vaccines were launched in the UK in December 2020.

While people with mild Covid were at an increased risk of blood clots, patients hospitalized with the virus were at significantly higher risk of cardiovascular disease in general. The risk of cardiovascular disease was highest in mild and severe cases in the first 30 days after infection, but continued later.

Additionally, patients hospitalized with Covid were 28 times more likely to develop blood clots, 22 times more likely to develop heart failure and 17 times more likely to have a stroke, according to the study. Overall, they were over 100 times more likely to die than people without Covid.

The scientists said their findings underscore the importance of long-term surveillance for cardiovascular disease even in people with mild Covid.

“Our findings underscore the increased cardiovascular risk of individuals with a prior infection, which is likely greater in countries with limited access to vaccination and thus greater population exposure to COVID-19,” the study authors wrote.

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Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) enters an elevator after leaving the floor of the US Senate following a roll-call vote to nominate Justice Samuel Alito to the US Supreme Court January 72-25, 2006 in Washington had , DC.

Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who this summer delivered the majority opinion to overturn the Roe v. Wade assured the late Senator Ted Kennedy in 2005 that he was considering an important legal basis for Roe’s “agreement” in a new report revealed.

“I believe in precedent,” conservative Alito told Kennedy, the liberal Massachusetts Democratic senator wrote in his diary in November 2005, the New York Times reported.

“I believe there is a right to privacy. I think it’s part of the 14th Amendment and Fifth Amendment liberties clause,” Alito said, according to the diary quote.

“So I recognize that there is a right to privacy. I believe in precedents. I think in the Roe case, that’s as far as I can go,” Alito told Kennedy, a staunch abortion advocate who died in 2009.

The comment was made while Alito was asking for Senate confirmation from the court during a visit to Kennedy’s office, John Farrell wrote in the Times report. Farrell’s new book, Ted Kennedy: A Life, which details the diary entries, will be released Tuesday.

The 1973 decision in Roe established for the first time that there was a federal constitutional right to abortion.

Roe was based on an earlier High Court decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, which held in 1965 that there was a constitutional right to marital privacy in a case where married couples were barred from using birth control.

For decades, conservatives attacked Roe as flawed, in part arguing that the Constitution does not expressly state that individuals have a right to privacy, let alone an abortion.

Associate Justice Samuel Alito poses during a group photo of Supreme Court justices in Washington, April 23, 2021.

Erin Schaff | swimming pool | Reuters

During his meeting with Alito, Kennedy was skeptical of the judge, who, while a Justice Department attorney during the Reagan administration, had written a memo in 1985 stating that he was opposed to Roe.

“Judge Alito assured Mr. Kennedy that he should not put much stock in the memo,” the Times reported.

“He had been trying to get a promotion and was writing what he thought his bosses wanted to hear. ‘I was a younger person,’ Judge Alito said. ‘I’ve matured a lot.’ “

Alito also said that his views on Roe’s erroneous decision were “personal”, according to Kennedy’s diary.

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“These are personal,” Alito said, Kennedy wrote in the diary. “But I have constitutional responsibilities and those will be the crucial views.”

Despite this assurance, Kennedy voted against confirming Alito in the Supreme Court.

Alito did not return a request to the Supreme Court press office for comment on the Times article.

In July, Alito wrote the majority ruling in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case, which overturned both Roe and another landmark abortion rights case, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, decided in 1992.

“Roe was terribly wrong from the start,” Alito wrote.

“His reasoning was exceptionally weak and the decision had damaging consequences. And far from bringing about a national solution to the abortion issue, Roe and Casey have sparked debate and deepened divisions,” he wrote, noting that these cases “need to be overruled.”

“The Constitution does not relate to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any provision of the Constitution, including that on which defenders of Roe and Casey now rely primarily — the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment,” he wrote.

It was that change, the 14th reportedly communicated to Alito Kennedy nearly 17 years earlier, that established a right to privacy.

But Alito’s opinion in Dobbs states that abortion is a “fundamentally different” right than such as “intimate sexual relations, contraception and marriage” because “it destroys… ‘fetal life'”.

The Dobbs ruling meant that individual states would again have the power to severely limit or even ban abortion, or allow it with loose restrictions.

Abortion has been widely banned in at least 13 states since Dobbs was issued.

In a statement consistent with Dobbs, Alito’s Conservative colleague, Justice Clarence Thomas, wrote that other landmark court decisions establishing gay rights and the right to contraception should be reconsidered after Roe was thrown out of the case.

In his opinion, Thomas said that these judgments “were demonstrably flawed decisions”.

The cases he mentions are Griswold v. Connecticut; Lawrence v. Texas, which established the right to engage in private sexual activity in 2003; and the 2015 judgment in Obergefell v. Hodges stating that same-sex marriage is a right.

Thomas pointed out that all of these decisions are based on interpretations of the due process clause of the 14th Amendment.

He wrote that the constitutional clause only guarantees “procedures” for depriving a person of life, liberty or property and cannot be used “to define the substance of those rights.”