Increase in Gunshot Deaths Leads to More Organs Available for Transplants

As the number of gunshot deaths climbs in Los Angeles County, there is at least one beneficial result: an increasing number of organs and other body parts are made available for transplants.

“Homicides are a terrible thing,” said Donald Ward, executive director of the Lion’s Doheny Eyebank, “but some good can come out of them.”

The eye bank, the second-largest such organization in the United States, surgically recovered more than 600 corneas from people shot to death last year in Los Angeles County. Many of those corneas, Ward said, helped restore the sight of elderly people and others suffering from eye afflictions, particularly cataracts.

Patients in Los Angeles, Ward said, once had to wait indefinitely for cornea donors.

“Today, there is no waiting list,” he said. “The homicide rate has certainly been a factor.”

State law allows coroners to remove corneas from the dead as long as there are no known objections. Other body parts cannot be removed without the permission of relatives unless the victim’s drivers license identifies the deceased as a volunteer organ donor.

Officials of the Regional Organ Procurement Agency of Southern California report a similar upturn in the number and percentage of organ donors killed by bullets.

The federally funded agency serves as a major referral service for hospitals and 1,400 area residents awaiting new hearts, lungs, kidneys and livers.

“There is no question,” senior transplant coordinator Barbara Schulman said, “that we see more gunshot wound referrals today.”

Including suicides, about 22 of the regional agency’s 134 organ donors in 1990 were victims of gunfire--about 16%.

In 1991, death by gunshot accounted for about 52 of 156 organ donors--or 33%.

People with fatal head wounds are particularly desirable as donors, Schulman said, because their hearts often continue to pump after they are declared brain-dead, which allows surgeons to transplant organs that are freshly oxygenated.

Victims shot in areas other than the head are usually ruled out as donors, Schulman said, because the bullet damage can contaminate the transplanted organs.