During a conference held in Hangzhou on the 15 th of March 2012, Huang Jiefu, China's Deputy Minister of Health, announced that China will ban the transplantations of human organs from executed prisoners in 3 to 5 years [1]. It represents the first step to regulate organ transplantation in a Country where 65% of transplants are grafts from non-heart-beating donors, over 90% of whom are executed...

BACKGROUND It is unclear how the public would respond to changes in government decisions about how much to spend on medical research in total and specifically on major disease areas such as cancer. Our aim was to elicit the views of the general public in the United Kingdom about how a change in government spending on cancer research might affect their willingness to donate, or to hypothecate a ...

This study examines the behavior of simple n-person bargaining problems under pre-donations where the Kalai-Smorodinsky (KS) solution is operant. Pre-donations are a unilateral commitment to transfer a portion of one’s utility to someone else, and are used to distort the bargaining set and thereby influence the bargaining solution. In equilibrium, these pre-donations are Pareto-improving over t...

BACKGROUND Population-based data on the rate and outcome of complications related to blood donation are sparse. STUDY DESIGN AND METHODS Data from a survey conducted in 2003 in Aarhus County, Denmark, were used to assess the overall rate of donor complications. Additional nationwide data on moderate and severe donor complications were obtained from the Danish Register of Complications Related...

We test a self-signaling theory using two large-scale, randomized controlled field experiments. Mobile phone users are randomly sampled to receive promotional offers for movie tickets via SMS technology. Test groups are exposed to different pre-determined levels of price discounts and charitable donations tied to the ticket purchase. The main effects of price discounts and charitable donations ...

In Europe, the dynamics of endemic hepatitis E virus (HEV) infection remain enigmatic. We studied the presence of silent HEV infection among Dutch blood donors. Using donations collected throughout the Netherlands in 2011 and 2012, 40,176 donations were tested for HEV RNA in 459 pools of 48 or 480 donations. Deconstruction of the reactive pools identified 13 viraemic donors. In addition, 5,239 ...