WORLD's SICKEST REALITY TV SHOW ; Contest for Patient's Kidneys

May 30, 05:42 AM

Current Headlines: By Alan Hall

A DYING woman will choose who gets her kidneys on a live reality TV show.

Transplant experts yesterday branded De Grote Donor Show - The Big Donor Show - as "sick".

Big Brother makers Endemol's latest programme is due to air on Dutch station BNN on Friday night.

Viewers will be asked to text in to advise the woman, known only as Lisa, which one of three candidates to give her organs to after death.

All three are seriously ill and on dialysis.

Critics slammed it for turning a life-and-death decision into prime-time entertainment.

Dutch Transplant Foundation spokesman Reiner Hofmann said: "This is a scandal, it is no better than selling organs.

"They are taking advantage of people in a desperate situation for entertainment."

MP Joop Atsma is to raise the matter with the country's health and media ministers in a bid to stop the show being screened.

He said it was "degrading, heart less and mor ally wrong".

Atsma added: "BNN are solving one problem but creating two others.

"Did BNN even consider how the two people who will be rejected will feel?"

BNN were founded by a kidney patient who was on dialysis since the age of five.

He died five years ago without getting a transplant.

Macabre They said the show would demonstrate the continuing shortage of organs in the Netherlands.

BNN president Laurens Drillich said: "Participants have a 33 per cent chance to get a kidney.

"That is substantially higher than people on the waiting list.

"One would expect the shortage of donor organs to diminish but the contrary is true."

Last night, the row spread to neighbouring Germany, where doctors spoke out about the "macabre element" of the show.

But Lisa, 37, said she is happy to go ahead.

Strict laws in the Netherlands mean people can't pick who gets their organs after their death.

But a live patient can decide who will get their kidneys.

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