Yoshiko Iwai, MS, a third-year student at the UNC School of Medicine, is the corresponding author of a research letter published in JAMA Network Open.
Yoshiko Iwai, MS, MFA, a third-year medical student at UNC, is first author of a research letter published March 8 in JAMA Network Open titled, “US Prison Policies on Organ Donation for Individuals Who Are Incarcerated.”
She and colleagues wrote, “Organ donation in prisons is ethically fraught. The Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network states, ‘absent any societal imperative, one’s status as a prisoner should not preclude them from consideration for a transplant.’ Organ donation ethics for incarcerated individuals have been debated, particularly around sentence reduction and discriminatory consequences. Bioethics literature underscores the complexity of supply-demand needs in the face of autonomy, practical barriers, and moral concerns. We collected data on US prison policies surrounding organ donation.”
Read more about this issue the the study, co-authored by Michael Forest Behne, BS, of the UNC Center for Health Equity Research in the UNC Department of Social Medicine; Jason M. Long, MD, MPH, associate professor in the division of cardiothoracic surgery; and Lauren Brinkley-Rubinstein, PhD, now faculty at Duke.