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Surgeon accused of trying to 'harvest organs'

Dan Glaister in Los Angeles
Wednesday August 1, 2007
The Guardian 

A California transplant surgeon has been accused of hastening the
death of a severely disabled patient in order to harvest his organs.
If found guilty, Hootan Roozrokh faces up to eight years in prison.
Dr Roozrokh was part of a team preparing to operate on Ruben Navarro,
25, who had been on a life support machine and was found to be
unresponsive. The patient's family had agreed to donate his organs.

In the operating room at the Sierra Vista medical centre in San Luis
Obispo county, 180 miles north of Los Angeles, Dr Roozrokh, 33,
ordered a total of 200mg of morphine and 80mg of the sedative Ativan
for the patient, far above normal doses. He also administered the
antiseptic Betadine through a tube into Navarro's stomach, a
sterilisation procedure normally done after death. But Navarro
survived for more than seven hours after being removed from life
support and given the drugs. The time limit for organs to remain
viable after life support has been withdrawn is 30 minutes.

Navarro was returned to intensive care, where he died the next
morning.
"The law and the facts indicated that Dr Roozrokh ... tried to
accelerate [Navarro's] death to facilitate the harvesting of his
organs," said chief deputy district attorney Stephen Brown.

Prosecutors said they were not pursuing murder charges because they
did not believe the drugs caused Navarro's death. Under Californian
law, transplant surgeons are forbidden from being involved in the
treatment of potential organ donors before they are dead. "The lines
weren't just blurred; [Dr Roozrokh] took over," Mr Brown said.
"Central to this case is the mistreatment of a disabled patient."

Gerald Schwartzbach, Dr Roozrokh's lawyer, called the charges
"unfounded and ill-advised", and said his client "has unfairly been
the subject of an 18-month witch-hunt".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2138938,00.html




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