Desperate British Health System Using Smokers' Lungs in Transplants

"Desperate transplant patients are being given the lungs of chain smokers because the NHS is so short of organ donations," London's Daily Mail reports. "Surgeons are also being forced to use diseased body parts from cancer sufferers, drug addicts and the very elderly."

The newspaper also reports that doctors are using tissue from those more at risk of carrying HIV and Hepatitis C, "such as gay men and drug users."

"In an ideal world you would rather have lungs from 20-year-old healthy people who have never smoked, but that isn't a luxury we have," Professor James Neuberger, associate medical director of the NHS Blood and Transplant agency, told the Mail. "You have to say do you get a lung with more risk or do you get no lung? That sounds crude and brutal but it is the reality."

"If I were to put it to you or a member of your family that there was a 50 per cent chance of transmitting a virus or a 100 per cent of dying, it will come down to the balance of risk."

According to the Mail, the increase in high risk organ use is because growing numbers of donors are either obese or very elderly. Up to a quarter of dead donors are very overweight compared to just a seventh ten years ago, according to figures from the NHS, while the number of donors over 70 has also quadrupled in the last decade.