ORGAN DONATIONS SAVE LIVES

Philadelphia Daily News: U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson has launched a nationwide effort to increase the supply of human organs available for transplantation.
Although the number of organs donated last year was nearly 23,000 -- up 5.3 percent over 1999 -- the number of people on the national waiting list has been growing even faster. It was about 76,000 in 2000, up more than 10 percent over the previous year.
The HHS plan calls on companies, unions and other organizations to stimulate donations of organs from their members. In particular, the plan promotes the idea of donor cards, on which individuals could indicate their desire to donate an organ after death.
HHS will also investigate whether a nationwide electronic registry of these potential donors should be established. A desperate need for organs and tissues can be filled only if more people consider this life-saving option.
There are stories every day about the tragic and unnecessary loss of life, resulting from lack of an available kidney or liver. Secretary Thompson noted that someone on the waiting list dies every 90 minutes, on average.
There are also heartwarming stories about lives saved.
Young lives: For example, the family of 11-year-old Sabrina Allen, one of the eight people who died in the disastrous North Philadelphia rooming house fire last week, donated the child's organs to help save other young lives.
It isn't just in death that we can save others. Relatives of people with serious kidney problems are increasingly supplying one of their own.
Sometimes, however, there is a troubling aspect to donations by the living.
This, too, can be illustrated by a recent local case.
Barry Howell, a 41-year-old con artist with 49 arrests and 21 convictions, offered to give one of his kidneys to his ailing older sister, Gloria Harris, in exchange for a much lighter sentence. Surprisingly, Philadelphia Common Pleas Judge Teresa Sarmina agreed, establishing a dubious precedent.
Only a slippery slope separates such decisions from the outright selling of organs on the open market. Farther down this slope lies the harvesting of organs by governments -- as has been alleged to occur in China and elsewhere.
We commend the HHS plan and encourage people to consider donating organs after death and to make their wishes known to relatives -- but we have one big caveat. As in all biological advances that pose new ethical questions, we should proceed cautiously.
GLINT OF CHANGE FOR VIETNAM
Los Angeles Times: The ruling old dogs in Hanoi could not learn new tricks, and they never really tried very hard. They gave a new name -- "doi moi," or open door -- to their Communist governing philosophy though they kept the old tools: political oppression and rigid economic order administered by arbitrary rules and corrupt officials. Transforming Communist Vietnam will take years, but the pressure on the power elite is mounting and some of the officials who stood in the way of progress are leaving. That offers a flicker of hope for change.
Disregarding its conservative Politburo's wishes -- in itself a sign the top layer of the Communist Party is cracking -- the Central Committee ousted Le Kha Phieu, the hard-line head of the party, and replaced him with a younger, more moderate legislator, Nong Duc Manh. With Phieu go his senior adviser, Do Muoi, and two other veteran hard-liners. The party also expelled or disciplined thousands of its members for corruption, some at the very top.
Famine: Vietnam embarked on doi moi in the late 1980s, partly to emulate Communist China next door and to pull the country out of famine. The United States responded by lifting economic sanctions and establishing diplomatic relations with Hanoi. The two countries signed a trade agreement last year that calls for radical changes in the way Vietnam runs its economy. Speedy ratification of the agreement by the U.S. Congress would help Vietnam's new leadership implement those changes. President Bush should submit the agreement to Congress, which, in the past, has expressed strong bipartisan support for normalizing trade relations with Vietnam. Bush, after all, regards robust free trade as a powerful vehicle for assisting political change.
Vietnam will not transform to a market economy overnight, but if it is to happen at all, there must be a change at the top. The departure of Phieu and his backward-looking advisers is a long step in the right direction.