14,000 Black Patients Move Up Kidney Transplant List Due To Racist Testing

Photo: Science Photo Library Over 14,000 Black patients have been moved up kidney transplant lists following revelations of racist medical testing. One of those patients, 29-year-old Jazmin Evans, was put on a kidney transplant list in 2019 and had her date moved up by years. According to a letter from her healthcare provider, Evans should’ve been added to the list in 2015. “I remember just reading that letter over and over again,” Evans told the Associated Press. “How could this happen?” AP reports that a once widely used test overestimated how healthy Black people’s kidneys actually were. An automated formula calculated results for Black and non-Black patients differently, causing a delay in diagnosis for organ failure and evaluation for transplants. A few years ago, the National Kidney Foundation and the American Society of Nephrology pushed for laboratories to change how they calculated kidney function. The U.S. organ transplant network followed suit by ordering hospitals to use only race-neutral tests when adding patients to kidney waiting lists. “The immediate question came up: What about the people on the list right now? You can’t just leave them behind,” Dr. Martha Pavlakis of Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and former chair of...