data suggested change is warranted, the committee would be able to approve it. jason carol, cnn, new york. and today javier s mother explained what we are family has been through watching their second child grow closer to death as he waits for lungs. this is like watching a movie that you have seen before and you want a different ending basically. so you are inclined to do whatever it takes to change that. it was very difficult dealing with that. my son was 11. he was a month shy of his 12th birthday when he passed. he didn t get the opportunity to receive the adult lungs. it impacted our lives and javier s also. that was his best friend, his buddy. they did everything together. they were hospitalized together. it has impacted him greatly. all right. these cases are fuelling a debate on whether dying children should get fast tracked to receive adult organs. arthur kaplan is the head of the
it s much more rare to receive a child s lung. much more common to have an adult lung available. because the donors who are eligible especially in children under the age of 12, most of those individuals die because of some other disease so they aren t even eligible to be a donor. what do you have to say to someone, congressman price, on that adult donor list and now has to compete with children like javier and sara. what do you say to that person? everyone from a clinical status depending on how severe their illness is, everyone ought to be treated equally. this is only fair. again, if the physicians involved and surgeons involved and transplant surgeons involved and family and institution and hospital is capable of doing this and they all believe the patient would be eligible for it, if they were an adult, then there isn t any reason not to treat everybody equally. just looking through the numbers. right now almost 1,700 people are on a waiting list for new lungs. 162 of the
that s why i gave the presentation i did. again, we want patients and families and doctors making these decisions and not washington d.c. on that note, now people are saying this is really sparked an interesting debate. just like what you were talking about. also the big question, does this create a new scenario of winners and losers if these children are now put on the adult donor list, does that mean someone else will lose out so that another person does get a lung? all we asked for and all the family was asking for is to have sara have the opportunity to get on the list. six, eight, ten years ago when the rules were formulated, the technology wasn t there to be able to make a child of sara s side technologically receive an adult lung. that s changed and that s why the doctors and scientists and surgeons and transplant surgeons involved said it was a good opportunity for sara if a donor became available. we didn t ask for her to go to the front of the line but to be considered wi
two children in desperate need of lung transplants are hoping they will get the operation soon. a ruling this week makes them more quickly eligible for receiving adult lungs. national correspondent jason carroll has all the details. reporter: javier acosta s family hoping he has a better chance of surviving. the 11-year-old has cystic fibrosis and needs a lung transplant, so, too, does 10-year-old sara mernahan. twinkle twinkle little star reporter: she suffers from the same disease, both are at the same hospital in philadelphia. each family praying a lung donor will come in time now thanks to a federal judge s decision. we sat down and explained the system a little bit in a way that she could understand. she got a lot of hope last night when i explained it to her. reporter: earlier this week the judge ordered the department
to be dropped and for her to be place owed the list for adult lungs. that s something health and human services secretary is refusing to do. the judge stepped in because she doesn t want to intervene. peter johnson, junior recently spent time with the family in the hospital. there is this arbitrary age and somehow we are asking for an exception, when we are asking her to be treated on the severity of her illness get the lung her doctors deem appropriate. they are acting like we are asking for this special treatment and we are not. we are asking for them to do what her doctor say is appropriate and best for her. it is like the government deciding what is best for her when they have never seen her. what does sara dream about? what does she talk about? we were talking earlier about when she gets out of the hospital. so she wants these mini tea cup peggies piggies as a