This Article  • References  • Full text PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in JAMA  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

Karol T. Wolicki, MD
Greensboro, NC

JAMA. 1994;271(4):270.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor.

—I find the article by Gaston et al¹ disturbing. The encroachment of specific racial issues into transplantation medicine seems to disqualify the scientific method and violate the art of medicine.

The argument in favor of injecting race bias into kidney allocation seems to hinge on two premises, one spoken and one not. The overt premise is that with modern immunotherapy, HLA matching is no longer predictive of graft survival. The covert premise is that such immunotherapy represents an acceptable therapy from a formal risk vs benefit perspective. If, in fact, both of these are true, then we are witnessing a technological triumph in renal transplantation that would obviate any specific racial reference and allow the formulation of a new race-blind protocol for allocation of scarce organs.

Until that time, the race-correlated but prejudice-free technique of HLA matching to enhance graft survival represents the state of the . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?