Smithfield makes move on market for pig-human transplants

[bluemingidiot]

"Smithfield Foods, the world's largest pork producer, has established a separate bioscience unit to expand its role in supplying pig parts for medical uses, with the ultimate goal of selling pig organs for transplantation into humans."

www.reuters.com/article/us-health-smithfield-foods-organs-idUSKBN17E0AM

Anyone raising their own heart valve?

[katievt]

Freaky...

As a 2x kidney recipient currently back on dialysis, pig organ transplants still feel wrong! Especially once they start adding human cells to pigs - gets into ethical issues, I believe.

[bluemingidiot]

Gob bless you.  Your situation makes me ashamed that I complain at all about my little infirmities.

I agree that ethical issues seem to be around nearly every corner.

Cardiologist told me that if I don't figure out a way to do myself in before then, there will come a day when I need a new heart valve. What I'm thinking right now is that I participate in the killing of a pig every time I buy sausage. Now the sausage my grandparents made included the heart. I cook and then eat the sausage and when I consume it, it becomes a part of me ('You are what you eat'). So is there a great difference when the pigs heart valve might become a part of me? Maybe I am looking for the most beneficial way out for me? I'm not sure.

The human cells make the situation more complex.  When I donate blood and someone gets a transfusion, my cells become part of them.  Just like an organ donation.  The one thing I couldn't abide is cells from aborted unborn children.  I do believe it is a wonderful thing when after the greatest efforts of medical science, a child dies and his/her parents allow organs to be given to another so that the receiving child has a greater chance of survival and living a full life.

[dustawaits]

Smithfield was bought by China, and yes they are experimenting with human cells....

[bluemingidiot]

In a striking advance that helps open the door to organ transplants from animals, researchers have created gene-edited piglets cleansed of viruses that might cause disease in humans. The experiments, reported in the journal Science, may make it possible one day to transplant livers, hearts and other organs from pigs into humans, a hope that experts had all but given up.

www.nytimes.com/2017/08/10/health/gene-editing-pigs-organ-transplants.html?hpw&rref=science&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region®ion=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well&_r=0

Wonder how the Muslim community feels about this?

[Woodpecker]

My sister in law had to have a pig valve years ago, more than 11 years ago. If she didn't the chances were great that she would die. She lived with the valve for 7 years, but she still passed young at 55 years old.

[bluemingidiot]

The human race is a vast and ancient relay of lives. The baton is the present. For endless generation the baton was a simple, ordinary thing. A few times it was dropped. But most of the times it was carefully placed in the hands of the future. What we have today is not so much of our own doing, but all the lives that ran before us. Will the baton we hand to the future heavy, large and onerous or the blessing we received from those before us.