Second Life

Organ donation is one thing, but what about donating your used pacemaker? Over the past several years a Detroit-based nonprofit called World Medical Relief (WMR) has sent 50 used pacemakers donated from local funeral homes to be sterilized and reused at hospitals in India and the Philippines. Now University of Michigan researchers are looking to shore up these efforts and partner with WMR and local funeral homes to solicit and ship off used cardiac devices to hospitals in the Philippines, Ghana, Nicaragua and Vietnam, helping to close the health-care gap between more- and less-developed countries in the field of electrophysiology.

To see if the public would really be on board with such a venture, the researchers talked to funeral home directors, patients and members of the general population in southeastern Michigan. The response: sounds good to us. Funeral home directors reported they currently have 166 used cardiac devices in storage with no intended purpose and 89 percent of the funeral directors expressed interest in donating them to charity. Eighty-seven out of 100 surveyed patients said they would be interested in donating their devices, too (ahem, after they were done using them) and about 70 percent of the general public said they would be willing to sign off on behalf of a loved one. The lead author of the studies, Timir Baman, a cardiac fellow at the University of Michigan Hospital, spoke to NEWSWEEK's Dina Fine Maron about his findings and how the program could be expanded. Excerpts:

MARON: How did you become interested in this issue?
BAMAN: About a year and a half ago one of my patients was just in for a routine checkup and said: "Oh, by the way, when I pass away I want my pacemaker donated for use in the Third World." Honestly, I chuckled a little bit and didn't really think anything of it because I'd never heard of it before. Then when she came back three months later she brought it up again, and at that point I was intrigued and started looking into the literature. I found that was something we really considered doing in the '80s and '90s. My patient had just thought this was the norm.

How widespread are these sorts of donations?
When we talked to 90 local funeral directors around Ann Arbor, Mich., approximately 10 percent had done it before. So this is something that is out there but not highly publicized.

Do we reuse pacemakers or implantable defibrillators at all in the United States?
No we do not reuse them at all.

Why?
I honestly don't know.

How much do pacemakers cost?
A low-end pacemaker can cost approximately $5,000, and certain defibrillators can be up to $50,000.