Leading Article: Don't be squeamish: pigs' organs could save human lives

THE DIRE shortage of organs for transplant medicine is a chronic and seemingly intractable problem. Only one in every three people who need an organ transplant actually has one because there are just not enough people prepared to become organ donors to meet the demand. Yet the Government says it has no intention of changing the organ-donor rules from an opt-in to an opt-out system - where organs can be automatically taken after death unless an objection has already been lodged.

Xenotransplantation, the use of animal organs for human transplant operations, offers a potential solution. In principle, an unlimited supply of organs could be produced if the technical and safety problems were overcome and the Government gave it the go-ahead. There have been objections to the idea on ethical grounds, both from compassion for the animals in question and because of revulsion about having an animal's organ inside a human being. Both concerns, however, are misplaced.

Pigs are the preferred animal for xenotransplants because they are about the same size as humans and, being domesticated, are easy to rear. People who know about pigs will tell you that they are extremely intelligent and many animal lovers will argue that this alone is ample justification for banning the practice of rearing them for their organs. Yet we rear them for their meat. In a society where animals are eaten, there is hardly room to argue that it is wrong to rear them for medical purposes, especially when doing so can save the lives of many hundreds of chronically ill patients, children included.

Then there is the "yuk" factor. Having a pig's heart may seem like a Frankenstein nightmare to many people, raising the spectre of half-human, half-beast chimeras. In fact, the same sort of ghoulish fears were rampant 40 years ago when the first objections were voiced against transplanting of human organs. Decades later, the thought that it is somehow repugnant to give one child the chance of a life by using the organs of another who has died appears curiously old fashioned.

We may find, in the early years of the next millennium, that the present debate about the use of pigs' hearts and kidneys becomes equally irrelevant. This does not mean, however, that pig organ transplantation should go ahead immediately, not least because of continuing concern about the transfer of viruses from animals to humans. Today's preliminary findings that people exposed to living pig tissue appear to be free of porcine virus are reassuring, but by no means definitive. We only have to look at HIV, which jumped the species barrier from monkey to man, to realise the potential dangers which are raised by xenotransplantation. But the principle is morally right; it's now just a question of medical safety.