Altruistic Directed Kidney Donation?

ITV's "Tonight" programme last night was about an American website which matches altruistic kidney donors with suitable recipients.  They claim to have matched over 250 altruistic donors with recipients (presumably mostly in the USA) although I didn't hear how long that took.  Apparently they are now launching a website for the UK as well.

Now, it turns out that this is not illegal in the UK, but it is contrary to the "accepted" way of doing things here.  In the UK, an "altruistic donor" is also called a "non-directed donor", because such a donor agrees to give a kidney to anyone (who is selected by the NHS, I presume).  Since this was made legal in the UK in 2006, there has been only just over 100 altruistic donations made (the figure they quoted was 117).  In this context, the US figure is quite significant.

The big question is whether this is the way to go?  The samples of videos from the USA frankly made me cringe.  I can see that there's an issue that the person who is loudest, with the best video and best self-promotion, is the one who gets a donor; this does not seem "fair".  It almost seems like a beauty pageant where the most attractive person wins, and I really do not think that we want to go down that route, do we? I can understand why the NHS wants to preserve anonymity as it avoids lots of issues and makes the process simpler but, if selecting your recipient actually has a significant effect on the total number of altruistic donors, then surely that's a good thing?

As you can see, I have no decided view on this matter; there are pros and cons for both sides.  However, I have a suggestion which is a compromise: given that the number of potential recipients far outweighs the realistic number of potential donors, why not let the donor (if they want to) specify (as I think they do on the US website) the type of person to whom they wish to donate and then select a receipient from a list of, say, 10 or 20 potential recipients?  These recipients must be happy to know their donor, and would surely be tested anyway to allow them to be matched to the donor.  Then the beauty parade is avoided as the NHS will have made their choice of the list on the basis of suitability and need (which is how I assume that they select a recipient already).  The current system could work alongside this for those who prefer anonymity.

I'm sure that more will be heard about this website...

Changing the subject slightly, I never mentioned the result of my fasting blood sugar test.  My score was 4.5 which of course is meaningless to most of us, but when I mentioned this on the phone to one of the transplant co-ordinators she said that 4.5 was "absolutely normal".  After my experience with the renal ultrasound (see this earlier entry), I didn't want to ask if she had omitted the caveat "for a man of your age"!