17 Jul 2009 Ethicist seeks law to say when dead is truly dead

By Tom Blackwell, National Post – July 17, 2009: A new trend to harvest transplant organs from people whose hearts have just stopped — but may not be yet brain dead — has underlined the “pressing need” for federal legislation to define exactly when someone has perished, a leading medical ethicist argues.

Canada has an assortment of case law and legislation defining end of life, but the growing use of organs from cardiac-death patients may violate the law, argues Jocelyn Downie of Dalhousie University in a recent journal paper. [Continue reading this article here.]