Allocation of Health Care Resources

17. Xenotransplantation certainly represents a form of possible treatment requiring a great outlay of both health care resources and economic resources.(⁷¹) For this reason, some people have expressed doubts about its ethical validity; given the large amounts of resources that it would take away from the other forms of therapeutic treatment and from other area of research, they consider both the uncertainty about its success and the risk entailed to be excessive. Faced with these doubts, it is important to remember that, even taken into due consideration the costs-benefits balance, the huge amount of health care resources used in this case is justified by the urgent need to try to save the lives of so many patients who would otherwise have no chance of survival.

It should also be added that as long as xenotransplantation on man remains at an experimental stage it should not be subject to the criteria applied to treatment in strict sense; rather it should be evaluated according to the criteria used for trials. Therefore, the foreseeable collective benefits that it may accrue in the future should also be taken into account. We do well to recognize here that the research into xenotransplantation which has taken place so far has also brought about greater medical knowledge in the area of allotransplantation.