New guidance for organ transplants

Doctors are to be issued with new guidelines warning that it is illegal to keep patients alive for the purpose of providing organs for transplants. Tom Sackville, the junior health minister, said surgeons would shortly be receiving a 'necessary clarification' of the law.

He stressed the guidelines were relevant only to a 'small number' of transplants. While urging people not to be alarmed by what he called 'over-sensational reporting', he accepted there may have been some 'unwitting technical infringements' of the law by doctors.