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Brain Death pp 208–214Cite as

Legal Considerations on the Determination and Certification of Human Death

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Abstract

During the last several decades physicians and the public have needed urgent changes in the legal codes for accepting brain death (BD) as death, in order to obtain organs from heart-beating donors. As transplantation has become increasingly more effective, the demand for organs has outpaced the supply. Patients in need of organ transplants are dying needlessly because of the paucity of organs. The needs of tissues and organs for treatment through transplantation and the demand for organs quickly outpaced the supply; consequently, it became evident that standards and priorities needed to be established in order to allocate the increasingly scarce number of organs for transplantation. The transplant community continues to grapple with the organ-sharing shortage, to find new and inventive ways to increase the donor pool, and to allocate organs in a fair and equitable way based on sound scientific decision making, while enhancing the science of transplantation. The “dead donor rule” requires that donors must first be declared dead.1–9

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  1. Department of Clinical Neurophysiology, Institute of Neurology and Neurosurgery, Apartado Postal 4268, 10400, Havana, Cuba

    Calixto Machado

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  1. Calixto Machado
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Machado, C. (2007). Legal Considerations on the Determination and Certification of Human Death. In: Brain Death. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-38977-6_9

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