|
Los Angeles: A surgeon in California was charged with prescribing excessive drugs to a comatose, disabled patient to hasten his death and harvest his organs for transplantation.
It is the first such criminal case against a transplant doctor in the United States, the San Luis Obispo County district attorney's office said on Monday.
Prosecutors said Dr Hootan Roozrokh, a 33-year-old Iranian-born US citizen, gave a harmful drug and prescribed excessive doses of morphine and a sedative to 26-year-old Ruben Navarro, who died in 2006.
Navarro was taken in a coma to Sierra Vista Regional Medical Centre, 241 kilometers northwest of Los Angeles, in 2006 after suffering respiratory and cardiac arrest.
Although he was found to have irreversible brain damage and was kept on a respirator, he was not considered brain dead because he still had limited brain function.
The day before Navarro died, his family gave approval for a surgical team to recover his organs for donation, though the procedure never occurred because Navarro did not die within 30 minutes of being removed from life support. He died the next day.
Roozrokh, a surgeon at Kaiser Permanente's now-closed kidney transplant programme, was working at the time on behalf of a group that procures and distributes organs.
The prosecutor's office said in a statement that the drugs were prescribed "to accelerate Mr Navarro's death in order to recover his organs."
State law prohibits transplant surgeons to be involved in the treatment of potential organ donors before they are declared dead. Roozrokh plans to surrender to authorities this week and post $10,000 (Dh36,731) bail, his lawyer, M. Gerald Schwartzbach, said.
|
