Ethical and societal problems in organ transplantation.

Transplantation medicine, like no other medical specialty, is connected with a wide range of very difficult ethical issues. Among those are: availability of the treatment, consent for cadaveric donation, allocation of available organs, new categories of living unrelated donors and economic aspects of this method of treatment. Authors discuss sensitive aspects in societal perception of the Polish Transplantation Act, ethical issues of living donor kidney transplantation, the role of mass media and economic aspects of transplantation.