This was sad

Girl, 12, kills herself to donate organs to family: But she is cremated before family finds suicide note detailing her wishes
Her father was losing his eyesight; her brother had kidney issues. They could not afford medical care. The young girl poisoned herself with a pesticide, trying to give them a second chance for life.

Of course, the pesticide would probably have rendered the organs unusable, the costs of transplants and immunosuppression are high, but she was 12, and most likely didn't understand that. What she did understand is that her loved ones were hurting. But her death may not be totally in vain; a politician stated that they would help her brother and father financially so that they could have the operations she wanted for them.

You have to be pretty desperate to seek an organ donation

and in many cases, it comes out as a miracle cure. And then there's this sort of thing...

Brain Amoebas. Organ Transplants. Brrr.

The CDC’s weekly bulletin today describes that nightmare scenario come true. Last year, four people received the kidneys, heart and liver of a 4-year-old boy who died in Mississippi of encephalitis that was assumed to be a rare reaction to flu infection. Weeks after the transplant, the two kidney recipients developed neurological symptoms — spasms, seizures, visual disturbances — and were hauled back to hospitals for evaluation. MRIs showed ring-shaped lesions in both their brains. That sent investigators back to re-examine the boy’s death — and revealed that while he did have encephalitis, it wasn’t because of flu.

It was because he was infected with a newly recognized pathogen, Balamuthia mandrillaris, a species of amoeba. It had passed to the four recipients via his organs, and grew in them with an assist from the immune-suppressing drugs they were taking to prevent rejection.

First of all, the deaths and illnesses of recipients were the only real clues that anything was wrong. Two clusters are described in the article, with a total of five people dying (including the two donors). The only real treatment was to put the others on a regimen of drugs that includes one not available in the US except under direst emergency.

This shows that 1) any time you deal with human tissue--even tissue that's been carefully scruitinised--you run the risk of passing along a pathogen, because the possibilities, while not quite endless, are there, although in practice it's thankfully rare that something fatal gets through, 2) there are pathogens we know very little about and don't occur much (this one has only been found in about 200 human cases), so they don't get studied much, and 3) there's just something terrifying about an organism that you know so little about that the authorities THINK it might be caught from inhaling amoeba cysts in dust. Yeah. Breathe in. It's things like that that make us hypochondriacs insane. Oh, and the kicker? The little boy was from Kentucky and it's unclear as to whether he caught the amoebic infection here or in Mississippi. Yeah. They could be anywhere, hiding in dirt. Here's to hopefully strong constitutions.

Oh, and here's a nice fact from Wikipedia (which needs some updating in some areas of the article, but this was nicely attributed*):
'Balamuthia is most easily identifiable in a brain biopsy performed on an individual suffering from Balamuthia meningoencephalitis. The amoeba cannot be cultured on an agar plate coated with gram-negative bacteria because unlike most amoeba, Balamuthia mandrillaris does not feed on bacteria. Instead the amoeba must be cultured on primate hepatic cells or human brain microvascular endothelial cells, or HBMECs, the cells that constitute the blood-brain barrier.'

Um. Am I reading that right? It eats brains cells? Well, I guess something other than zombies have to, but yuck!

*Martínez AJ, Visvesvara GS (March 2001). "Balamuthia mandrillaris infection". J. Med. Microbiol. 50 (3): 205–7. PMID 11232763.

Infinitesimal odds, but deadly just the same

Man dies of uterine cancer linked to transplant: Doctors doubted disease could spread to him through donated kidney

Vincent Liew waited five years for the kidney that was supposed to change his life. Instead, the organ ended it.

The kidney came from a woman who had uterine cancer, but she and doctors didn't know it. Once her disease was discovered after the transplant, Liew's doctors highly doubted it could spread to him.

But in seven months, Liew was killed by cancer that his autopsy linked to the transplant. His death, the subject of a medical malpractice trial in which closing arguments were scheduled for Thursday, is believed to be the only reported instance of uterine cancer apparently being transmitted by transplant, medical experts say.

Men can and do get breast cancer, of course, but this is so very unusual it's one for the books. It's important to realise that there's a very low chance of getting a disease from a transplant--in 2007 just 23 out of 28,000 recipients contracted anything, just over half of them dying. But according to the article more than 107,000 people are currently awaiting an organ, lives that could be saved with a transplant. Although screening is done, the detailed results of an autopsy are rarely available in the short window of time between removal of the organ and transplantation. Mr Liew was informed of a chance of the cancer being transmitted, but it was such a small risk he chose to keep the organ. Within a few months, he was dead. The only room for malpractice I can see is that for some reason it took two months for the surgeon to be notified of the cancer found in the donor. Otherwise, it sounds like something no one could have actually predicted as probable. Still, it's sad that he died when the organ was to give him a new lease on life.