Britain investigates 800,000 organ donor list of errors

Britain investigates 800,000 organ donor list of errors:
transplantation agency of Great Britain said Saturday that he was a few hundred thousand errors in its donor list spans a decade review.

The National Health Service Blood and Transplant organization said some of the 14 million constituent organ donor list is affected by technical problems since 1999 - and that a small percentage of people organs removed without proper authority and had that effect.

The programming error meant that, for example, people who wanted to donate organs as their lungs and their skin had been wrongly identified as people who wanted to donate their corneas or heart.

The Sunday Telegraph said the glitch affected about 800,000 people - of whom 45 are now deceased and donated organs. Slightly less than half of which are thought to have made donations based on false information, the paper said.

An official with the National Health Service did not dispute the figures of the paper, although they can not confirm them, saying an investigation was ongoing. She spoke anonymously because the officials are still gathering information before contacting the affected families.

She stressed that everyone on the register was a willing donor of a kind.

"There is no indication that people have joined the register who do not want to be there," she said, adding that no details had been lost and the problem had been contained.

"There is no possibility of incorrect data being used today," she said.

The revelation comes at an awkward time for the government, which is pushing to Britain the rate of organ donation, one of the lowest in Europe. Officials are poured millions of pounds (dollars) in an awareness campaign and floated the idea of designating each person is automatically a donor unless they opt out of their survivors.

Currently, each Briton is automatically considered a non-donor unless they registered as a decision or their families to donate their organs after death.

The glitch is also on top of a series of accidents, information technology, raising questions about the ability of government to its citizens to process data. Officials have misplaced data on 3 million driving test candidates, 600,000 applicants for military, prison officers and 5,000 in recent years.

They were overshadowed by the loss in 2007 of computer disks containing information - including banking records - on nearly half the British population.

The last error came to light late last year when the organization Blood and Transplant wrote for new donors to thank them for joining the register and to outline what they had agreed to donate.

Some contributors wrote back to complain that the information was wrong.

Joyce Robins, co-director of the watchdog Patient Concern group of patients, said the transplant errors were "a disaster."

"The problem is that it happens so often. We are constantly told that our data is safe, and it's nonsense. Every time we hear that things will be tightened, it will never happen, and it does not .