Non-directed kidney donation is up in the UK

Altruistic organ donations rise in UK almost three-fold

"The number of living people giving one of their organs to a stranger almost tripled last year in the UK, according to new figures.

The Human Tissue Authority (HTA) approved 104 so-called altruistic organ donations in 2012-13 compared with 38 the previous year."
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Here are the UK statistics, and here is the page for the UK's kidney exchange program: Paired donation matching scheme

Horse meat (unlabelled) in Britain and elsewhere in Europe

There has been a lot of press on the fact that horse meat has been discovered mis-labeled as beef in Britain, and now elsewhere in Europe. This (probably criminal) mis-labeling of a cheap and unregulated food product as something else is compounded by the fact that, in Britain at least, people prefer to ride ponies than to eat them. So, the main story line doesn't seem to involve repugnance per se (i.e. the reluctance of people towards other people eating horse meat). But it certainly involves some disgust.

Here are some of the stories:

The British Hate Horse Meat. The French Love Horse Meat. Americans? Meh.


Horse Meat in Food Stirs a Furor in the British Isles
"The labeling of horse meat as beef has breached one of the great culinary taboos of Britain and Ireland, two countries that pride themselves on their love of certain animals, particularly horses. The fact that the source of the meat appears to have been mainland Europe, where the consumption of horse meat is far more common, has raised suspicions of fraud because beef is more expensive than meat from horses."

Waiter, There's a Horse in My Lasagna

Horse meat and the economics of disgust

Same sex marriage legislation under consideration in Britain, France and Rhode Island

Three legislature, three bills, three pictures...



Gay Marriage Bill Approved in Rhode Island House Vote (now on to the State Senate)

And across the sea, Thousands Rally in Paris For Same-Sex Marriage (as the legislature prepares to consider a bill supported by the new government).

and
British House of Commons Approves Gay Marriage (not wit)hout a lot of dissent from the governing party

update: and it's not over til it's over:

Tory rebels may scupper gay marriage in the Lords

David Cameron faces another bitter battle over his plans to introduce gay marriage, with more than half of Conservative peers expected to vote against the move.

I predict a surge in demand for kosher beef in Britain...

...after reading this in the Telegraph: Tesco beef burgers found to contain 29% horse meat

"In Tesco Everyday Value Beef Burgers, horse meat accounted for approximately 29 per cent of the meat. The supermarket announced last night that it was removing all fresh and frozen burgers from sale immediately regardless if they had been found to contain horse meat.
...
"More than a third (37 per cent) of the products tested in Ireland contained horse DNA, while the vast majority (85 per cent) also contained pig DNA.
...
"Prof Alan Reilly, the chief executive of the FSAI, said: “While there is a plausible explanation for the presence of pig DNA in these products, due to the fact that meat from different animals is processed in the same plants, there is no clear explanation for the presence of horse DNA in products emanating from meat plants that do not use horse meat.”

Selective abortion based on gender: illegal in Britain but not in the U.S.

Two stories, the first from the Telegraph and the second from the Washington Post, reveal the different legal status of abortions for the purpose of choosing the gender of a child in Britain and the U.S.

Abortion investigation: doctors filmed agreeing illegal abortions 'no questions asked'. Women are being granted illegal abortions by doctors based on the sex of their unborn baby, an undercover investigation by The Daily Telegraph reveals.

"Doctors at British clinics have been secretly filmed agreeing to terminate foetuses purely because they are either male or female. Clinicians admitted they were prepared to falsify paperwork to arrange the abortions even though it is illegal to conduct such “sex-selection” procedures."
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Bill banning ‘sex-selective abortions’ fails in the House

"A measure to ban abortions based on the sex of a child failed Thursday to earn enough support in the House, and abortion opponents said they plan to use the vote to paint Democrats as disingenuously supporting women’s rights because they voted against a bill protecting unborn baby girls.

Lawmakers voted 246 to 168 on the Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act (PRENDA), which would punish doctors with up to five years in prison for performing abortions because the parents are seeking a child of the other sex. But the bill failed to pass as House Republicans brought it up under a suspension of normal rules that required it to earn a two-thirds majority vote. Twenty Democratic lawmakers voted for the bill; seven Republicans voted against it.

...

"Several nations, including Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany and France, ban sex-selective abortions. The United States has no such law, even though the State Department has published reports critical of other countries, including China, for widely accepting the procedure.

Sex-selective abortions are so common in some Asian and Eastern European countries, including China, India, Armenia and Serbia, that the number of boys being born is much greater than the number of girls,according to the Guttmacher Institute, an abortion rights research center. In the U.S., 105 boys are born for every 100 girls, a ratio that the Center for Disease Control and Prevention considers stable. But limited studies have found that the practice is common among Asian American communities, where women cite family pressure to have male children.

Efforts to combat sex-selective abortions are more active at the state level. Eight states have introduced measures this year to ban the procedure, and three states — Arizona, Pennsylvania and Oklahoma — ban sex-selective abortions. A similar law in Illinois was scrapped by state courts.

Two-tier tuition and foreign students at British universities

How foreign students with lower grades jump the university queue:
 Exclusive: Foreign students are being offered places at top British universities with far lower A-level grades than school pupils in this country, a Daily Telegraph investigation discloses.

"Universities were accused of profiteering by rejecting tens of thousands of British teenagers, currently sitting A-levels, so they can fill places with more profitable foreign students.


"Universities say that even the new £9,000-a-year tuition fees for British and European Union students do not cover their costs, and they need to turn to foreigners who are charged 50 per cent more."
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I'm reminded of the line from Casablanca: "I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!"

Priority for organ donation in the UK?

Britain's National Health Service is conducting a survey as part of an assessment of possible changes to its methods of acquiring and allocating organs for transplantation.

NHS considers organ donation shakeup

"The survey asks whether the UK should follow Israel's lead and say that those who are on the organ donor register should get priority if they subsequently need a transplant. "It always seemed to me that fairness is quite a fundamental British value but we have never put that in the context of organ donation," Johnson said.

"The question of presumed consent for organ donation is also raised once more. Only the Welsh assembly government has formally adopted this possibility within the UK, and it plans to legislate in 2015 if its formal consultation goes its way.

"The NHSBT survey asks about extending the recently introduced practice by which the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Centre "nudges" those renewing or updating licences into deciding whether they want to join the donor register to other documents, such as marriage applications or wills. Johnson floated using the new universal credit, the single payment for those seeking work or on low incomes."

The article also speaks of the shortage of deceased donor organs:
"About 1,000 people die in the UK each year because they do not get a transplant, according to NHSBT. Johnson said more people wanted to become donors but the transplant service could not use all the organs they donated. More than 500,000 people die in Britain each year, but only about 3,000 in circumstances where they could realistically become organ donors.
"The reality is you have to die in hospital, on a ventilator, also in the intensive care or emergency department. The number of people dying who are under the age of 75, which is where most of our donors come from, has dropped by about 15% in the last few years. The people who are dying therefore tend to be older, they tend to have more co-morbidity than the rest of the population and, like the rest of the population, they have a tendency to be fatter. Consequently there are a number of people who would like us to use their organs but their organs might not be suitable."


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Before we get too excited, note that it's a lot easier to consider changes than to enact them: see my 2008 post on attempts in Britain to move towards presumed consent for organ donation.

Regarding priority for organ donation, Judd Kessler and I have a paper coming out in the August AER:
Kessler, Judd B. and Alvin E. Roth, '' Organ Allocation Policy and the Decision to Donate,'' American Economic Review, forthcoming.

Indian surrogates bearing British babies

The Telgraph reports: how more and more Britons are paying Indian women to become surrogate mothers.

"There are now up to 1,000 clinics, all entirely unregulated, in the country, many specialising in helping Britons become parents.

"Couples and single people are paying an average of £25,000 a time to have children, getting around rules in the UK which make commercial surrogacy illegal.

"It is estimated that 2,000 births to surrogate mothers took place in the country last year, with most experts agreeing that Britain is the biggest single source of people who want to become parents in this way. Britain may account for as many as 1,000 births last year in India. In contrast there were 100 surrogate births recorded in Britain last year.
...
"Dr Sharma has chaired a committee which has drawn up proposals for industry standard. It would guarantee safety standards for the first time, outlaw sex selection, forbid women capable of childbirth making use of surrogacy and set up the first register of clinics, with a regime of inspections and sanctions for those which fail them.
...
"However the legislation has yet to be considered by India’s parliament and it could be many years before it becomes law. Dr Sharma’s committee has called for urgent action.
...
"Clinics in India offer fertility treatments which would-be parents in Britain would either be unable to have for legal reasons, or would face lengthy waits on the NHS to obtain.
...
"One clinic in New Delhi, The Birthplace of Joy, said that their patients were “100 per cent foreign” and estimated that as many as half of them were homosexual couples wanting to become parents."

Adults for adultery?

The Telegraph reports: British women drive demand for extramarital dating websites: More than a million British adults have subscribed to extramarital affair dating websites, with up to 400,000 unique users logging on each week.

"MaritalAffair.co.uk, one of the largest sites of its kind, has almost 600,000 members. Analysis shows most members are parents aged 35 to 54, university educated, and browse from their own homes. Women using the site on a weekly basis outnumber the site three to one.
"Ashley Madison, a US-based website specialising in “discreet affairs” said it received a new British member every 45 seconds. More than 150,000 Britons use the site each week."

How to evaluate school choice: Daily Telegraph

The Daily Telegraph has an article about school choice in Britain that uses what strikes me as a tricky standard to declare that something is rotten in Britain:

Children 'forced to accept unpopular secondary schools': Almost 75,000 children have been rejected from their preferred secondary school amid a desperate scramble for the most sought-after places, official figures show.

The article goes on to say
"More than one-in-seven pupils across England are being forced to accept second, third or fourth-choice schools this September, it emerged.
...
"According to figures, some schools in parts of London received as many as nine applications for every place.

"Mr Gibb said: “I want us to reach a position where it is parents choosing schools, not schools choosing parents."
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And here's a similar article about younger kids: More children rejected from first-choice primary school

"Among councils that provided year-on-year figures, some 90 per cent reported an increase in applications in 2012 compared with 2011.
"In those areas, almost 14 per cent of four and five-year-olds failed to get into their first choice school
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Britain would not be alone in having a shortage of good schools, but the point I want to raise about these articles is that the statistics mentioned could instead indicate that Britain has a few remarkably good schools that are oversubscribed. That would be something quite different, but it would still mean that many students didn't get one of their top choices.

Kidney exchange in Britain

David Manlove, who wrote in 2010 about Britain's first 3-way kidney exchange, writes today about work with his former student Gregg O'Malley:

" I thought you might be interested to see a paper that my colleague Dr Gregg O’Malley and I have recently written on our experience of collaborating with NHS Blood and Transplant on their paired and altruistic kidney donation matching scheme.  The paper is available in technical report form here: http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/publications/paperdetails.cfm?id=9383, and is to appear at SEA 2012 (http://sea2012.labri.fr).

As part of this research, Gregg has created two web applications for producing optimal solutions to kidney exchange problems.  The first, at http://kidney.optimalmatching.com, finds a solution that is optimal with respect to the precise criteria involved in the UK scheme.  The second, at http://toolkit.optimalmatching.com, is capable of accepting alternative optimality criteria (and comparing and contrasting simultaneously the effect of using different optimality criteria).

Although the web applications were built primarily with the UK application in mind, we hope that they may be interesting and useful for those involved in similar matching schemes elsewhere.

Best regards,
David"

Doubt on college admissions reform in Britain

In an earlier post I wrote about plans for change in Britain's college admissions system.
Apparently that is far from a sure thing: Admissions Debate in Britain

"Several universities have threatened to withdraw from Britain's centralized admissions system if "post-qualifications applications" are introduced, casting doubt on the future of the proposed reforms.

"The threat to “opt out” of the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service was made by members of the 1994 Group, which represents 19 smaller research-intensive institutions, in its response to plans for students to apply to higher education after receiving their A-level results. Other groups have also voiced their opposition to the radical shake-up of admissions put forward for consultation by UCAS in October, placing the overall project in jeopardy.

"Under the proposals – earmarked for introduction in 2016 – students would sit their A-level exams six weeks or a month earlier and receive their results in July rather than August. They would then apply to just two universities and start the academic term in early October.

...

"Without support from universities, which fund UCAS through subscriptions, the plans are “highly unlikely to be picked up,” said Matthew Andrews, chair of the Admissions Practitioners’ Group of the Academic Registrars Council." 

Same sex marriage: the debate in Britain

Old repugnancies die hard...
Gay marriage is like slavery, Catholic leader says 

 "Britain’s most senior Catholic, Cardinal Keith O'Brien, has condemned gay marriage as an “aberration”, likening it to slavery and abortion."

"Cardinal Keith O'Brien said countries which legalise gay marriage are “shaming themselves” by going against the “natural law,” and should not consider their actions “progress”. :

"He claimed same sex unions were the “thin end of the wedge” and would lead to the “further degeneration of society into immorality.”
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And, in a related story


The Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales is intensifying its campaign against the government's plan to legalise same-sex marriage.
"In a letter being read in 2,500 parish churches, the Church's two most senior archbishops say the change would reduce the significance of marriage.

 "The letter says Roman Catholics have a duty to make sure it does not happen.

Organ donation in Britain

The BBC reports on a new report by the British Medical Association: BMA calls for fresh debate on rate of organ donation. It focuses on some of the same issues that have been discussed in the U.S. and elsewhere.

You can find the report here: Building on Progress: Where next for organ donation policy in the UK? (direct link to pdf here).

"This report documents the changes that have taken place since the Organ Donation Taskforce published its report in January 2008. It records the significant improvements that have been made to the infrastructure and the projected 34% increase in donation rates over the four years to April 2012. The report notes, however, that even if the Taskforce’s target of a 50% increase in donation rates by 2013 is achieved, people will still be dying unnecessarily while waiting for an organ.

 "We believe that, as a society, we now need to decide whether we should be satisfied that we have done all we can or whether we should seek to build on what has already been achieved by shifting out attention to additional ways of increasing the number of organ donors.

 "The report examines a range of options that have been suggested for increasing the number of donors including a system of mandated choice, reciprocity, a regulated market or paying the funeral expenses of those who sign up to the Organ Donor Register and subsequently donate organs. The report also explains why we remain convinced that an opt-out system with safeguards is the best option for the UK."

Assisted suicide: the British debate continues

Allow assisted suicide for those with less than a year to live

"The independent Commission on Assisted Dying, whose members include several prominent peers and medics, wants GPs to be able to prescribe lethal doses of medication for dying people to take themselves."

Even the name of the Commission makes clear why assisted suicide is often regarded as a repugnant transaction, and why the discussion of how doctors may reasonably treat terminally ill patients is so fraught.

College admissions, exams, and "clearing" in Britain

The Telegraph reports: Academic condemns 'tortuous' university admissions

"Mary Beard, the Cambridge University classics professor, said the admissions system employed in Britain was “more difficult and stressful than it should be”.

...

"The comments were made after the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service proposed a sweeping overhaul of the current system.

"They are planning to allow students to apply for places after receiving their results for the first time in a move that would lead to A-levels being brought forward and candidates choosing courses over the summer.

...

"Currently, students are supposed to apply to Oxbridge by October – around a year before courses start – and to other universities in January. Candidates are then given provisional offers based on the proviso that they gain predicted exam grades the following summer.

"Those who fail to score high enough in A-levels and other qualifications are eligible for “clearing” – the system that matches students to spare places.

"But writing on BBC online, Prof Beard said: “More than anything, it is the bizarre timetable that makes the application process so preoccupying.

“When we say in January or February that someone ‘got in’ to their chosen university, we don't actually mean that. We mean that they will have got in if they achieve the grades demanded by the university in their summer exam, which even if all goes well, drags out the nail biting for a good six months.”

"She added: “If it doesn't go well and they don't get the grades, they enter a whole new round of applications in August.

“This is a frenetic process, with applicants tracking down the remaining unfilled places by email and phone - then being given maybe a few hours to accept a place for a course they haven't really explored at a university they know little about.”

Schools' choices and school choice in England

In the U.S., charter schools are typically not allowed to be choosy: they often have to offer admission strictly by lottery. In England, there's controversy over religious schools, and the following story illustrates some of the issues.

Catholic school in new row over school admissions

"Coloma Convent Girls' School in Croydon was reported to the official admissions watchdog by the local diocese amid claims its entry rules are “discriminatory”.

The over-subscribed school – which is rated outstanding by Ofsted and regularly appears towards the top of league tables – gives more “points” to families who take part in parish activities.

But the Catholic Archdiocese of Southwark complained that the system discriminated against single parents who were unable to find the time to take part in parish work.

It also said it was unfair on immigrants who did not share the same “tradition of community service” and struggled to provide written evidence of volunteering because English was not their first language.

The move comes after Diocese of Westminster shopped the hugely popular Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School to the admissions watchdog, complaining that its entry rules were too elitist and effectively penalised the less devout.

The opposite of price gouging: UK riot edition

UK riots: Amazon withdraws truncheons after bumper sales: Sales of baseball bats, Kubotans and other self-defence items soar inaftermath of rioting in English cities

HT: Chris Masse

College admissions in England

Inside Higher Ed follows the Plan to Restructure British Higher Ed

"The British government released its long-awaited "white paper" on the future of higher education, offering a sweeping set of proposals that would produce dramatic changes in how the country would educate students and fund institutions.
...
"The reform plan released by British government's Department for Business Innovation and Skills says that in the first year of the new funding regime, around 65,000 high-achieving students will be able to go to whichever university will have them. This represents a change from the present strict controls on the number of students each university can accept. It raises the prospect of some elite institutions expanding their intake to vacuum up more top students.

"The government’s aim is to ensure that students with very high grades -- AAB or above -- on the country's college entrance exams will have a better chance of reaching their first choice of university.
...
"However, this new contestability will sit within an overall cap on the total number of student places in the sector. Consequently if some elite institutions expand their intake, it will be at the expense of others, which will necessarily have to shrink.

"It also means that highly selective institutions, such as those in the 1994 and Russell Groups (consortiums of elite universities), will have to compete for a large proportion of their students, many of whom already achieve AAB or above on the "A level" exams.
...
"Willetts denied that the government’s aim was to create an elite set of institutions in which all the top-achieving students were concentrated.

“I’m not trying to plan the system. The whole point about this is we’re taking some steps back and it will be the choices of students and the reaction of institutions – I have no view on that,” he said.
"He argued that with funding following the student, and universities and colleges forced to compete for those students, the quality of teaching and learning, and the student experience, would rise.
“We’ve got very strong incentives to reward research, and the intense competition through the [research excellence framework] and research councils has yielded an incredibly strong research [base]. We haven’t had comparable incentives on teaching,” he said."


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A followup article elaborates on the two tier structure being contemplated: New Competition in the UK

"Asked for comments on the changes ushered in by the white paper, two vice-chancellors were critical of plans to make another 20,000 student places "contestable" by auctioning them off to institutions that charge average fees, after waivers, of below £7,500 (about $12,000).
...
"Under the government’s proposals, universities with students who secured grades of AAB or higher would lose those students from their standard allocation of places, but would then be allowed to recruit as many above the AAB threshold as they wanted, provided they could attract them.

"As an estimated 65,000 such places become contestable, some universities will lose AAB students and will be forced to drop their average fees below £7,500 if they want to claw back their numbers.Times Higher Education understands that an elite group of just 10 institutions have 40 percent of all AAB students
...
"Martin Hall, vice-chancellor of the University of Salford, said the combined effect of the AAB plans and the sub-£7,500 auction would be to increase "social sorting." Applicants would increasingly "end up going to universities with students like themselves," he argued.

"Hall said the government was allowing universities with more privileged student cohorts to charge £9,000 because they were perceived to be "high quality," while seeking to force down fees at universities such as Salford with high proportions of disadvantaged students.

"We serve that group. That is our mission, and we try to serve them well," he said. "The assumption that we don’t do that through providing quality is completely untested. If you are serving students … from non-traditional university backgrounds … you have to provide more resources to help [them]. In my university, teaching provision costs more than in a so-called 'top' university, where students come in with two As and a B."

School choice in England

László Sándor points me to an Economist blog post about school choice: Schools admissions codes--Playing games.

It begins with a nice paragraph about how school choice, and other selection processes, are two-sided matching markets.

"CHOICE is a central tenet to the reform of public services, whether it is made by patients seeking the best hospital care or parents looking for a decent education for their child. But there is another, widely neglected aspect to choice: that made by those who head publicly-funded institutions. It is all very well for a youngster to chose to apply to Oxford University, but admissions tutors also chose which candidates to admit.
...
"The rule book that governs all this is absurdly complex, and education secretary Michael Gove is bent on simplifying it. On May 27th he  launched a consultation* on the proposed new admissions code. It suggests that selecting pupils by lottery (as Brighton does) rather than by how close they live to the school should be banned. More controversially it also proposes that the children of school staff should be offered places ahead of others, a practise that was banned only a few years ago and which,  research suggests, led to good schools being forced to take pupils from poorer homes. For the first time, it recommends, head teachers should be free to admit children whose families have incomes that are so low that the children are offered free school meals.
The reasoning behind these proposals is fairly clear: they are necessary to make palatable the opening of the independently-run but state-funded "free" schools, the first tranche of which will admit pupils in September. These schools can be established by parents who might then be unable to get their child into the schol under the existing rules, hence the suggestion that such pupils should be favoured over others."

*this link only seems to work from the original article, linked at the top...