Transplants Resume

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Anchor lead: People who are awaiting kidney transplants now have at least two options, Elizabeth Tracey reports

Many people who need a kidney have had their surgeries delayed by recent events, but now those constraints are starting to ease.  Andrew Cameron, director of organ transplantation at Johns Hopkins, says more kidneys than ever are available.

Cameron: Of the 100,000 Americans waiting 80,000 are waiting for a kidney. There’s two great ways to get a kidney transplant. One is cadaveric donation, somebody that’s died and agreed to donate their organs and the other way is from a living donor. From the folks that donate after they pass away we used to discard some of those organs because they had sustained some injury or if they have hepatitis C or maybe even if the donor had HIV. We now understand that there are safe ways to use those kidneys and they function as well or better than the other kidneys we’ve already been using.  :35

Cameron says utilizing all of these strategies should help reduce the length of the waiting list for kidney transplants. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.