{
  "id": "1999-october-transplant-disparity",
  "slug": "1999-october-transplant-disparity",
  "url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1999-october-transplant-disparity.html",
  "year": 1999,
  "month": "October",
  "monthNum": 10,
  "headline": "Transplant disparity",
  "kicker": "ANALYZING MEDICAL DATA",
  "author_name": "Kevin McCoy",
  "author_title": "Reporter",
  "affiliation": "The New York Daily News",
  "summary": "A New York Daily News investigation used data analysis and computer tools to expose disparities in organ transplants, revealing that African-American and Latino patients in the New York City area received fewer heart, liver, and lung transplants despite higher disease rates and greater need.",
  "keywords": [
    "transplants",
    "disparities",
    "minorities"
  ],
  "topics": [
    "Health & Environment",
    "Data & Databases",
    "Investigative Methods"
  ],
  "technologies": [
    "Excel",
    "FoxPro",
    "Internet",
    "World Wide Web"
  ],
  "full_text": "The New York Daily News' headline on Aug. 8 was dramatic: \"Deadly Disparity in Transplants, Blacks and Hispanics Deprived.\" Behind it lay months of research and reporting, some of it aided by computer.\n\nThe two-part series showed that African-American and Latino patients in the New York City area got fewer heart, liver and lung transplants during the last three years even though they suffer higher rates of diseases that might make them need a transplant to survive.\n\nThe stories also showed that African-Americans have far greater need for kidney transplants than other patients because they suffer higher rates of kidney failure. Yet African-Americans in the New York City area face the longest wait in the nation for a donated kidney.\n\nThe long road that led to the series began with a suggestion from a health care official who pointed me to the Web site of the United Network for Organ Sharing (www.unos.org), the agency that coordinates all organ transplants in the United States.\n\nWhat caught my attention was UNOS' \"critical data\" on the race of donors and recipients for specific types of transplants at hospitals in New York City. The statistics for heart, liver and lung transplants seemed to show a large disparity that favored whites. Unfortunately, the data was outdated.\n\nI contacted UNOS and asked if the agency had more updated transplant data, by race and by organ, for New York City-area hospitals. I also posed the question to the New York Organ Donor Network, the agency that works with UNOS to coordinate transplants in the city and eight surrounding counties.\n\nThe agencies declined to release the most recent hospital-by-hospital data. But through negotiations the officials agreed to provide a breakdown of transplant donors and recipients, by race and by organ, for the entire New York Organ Donor Network coverage area from 1996-1998.\n\nThis data, analyzed with U.S. Census population estimates and disease and mortality rates from the National Center for Health Statistics, provided partial confirmation that minority patients got certain kinds of transplants less often than their white counterparts.\n\nVerifying the evidence\n\nSeveral transplant doctors who agreed to analyze the data confirmed the conclusion. However, I wanted additional evidence. I suspected there was other data, not available on the UNOS Web site, that might help test the conclusion.\n\nI asked UNOS if they could further break down the data for me by providing the zip codes of each organ donor and recipient. They sent it a few weeks later in an Excel spreadsheet.\n\nZip code data would tell me whether the organ recipients came from white or minority neighborhoods.\n\nI imported it into Visual FoxPro, then started to analyze transplant recipients by neighborhood.\n\nNext, I contacted the New York City Department of Health and asked for neighborhood breakdowns of deaths caused by major heart, liver, lung and kidney diseases. The agency readily agreed to provide the data.\n\nFocusing the search\n\nOnce it arrived, I focused in part on deaths from liver cirrhosis and hepatitis. African-Americans and Hispanics suffer far higher rates of these diseases than whites.\n\nMoreover, there had been enough liver transplants performed in the metropolitan area during the last three years to allow me to conduct a statistically valid analysis.\n\nThe Health Department data showed that residents of an 18-zip code section of the South Bronx and East Harlem, areas that feature a largely African-American and Latino population, suffered the city's highest rates of deaths from liver disease.\n\nDid residents of these communities get the highest share of liver transplants? No. In fact, the FoxPro analysis showed that residents of these areas got less than 4 percent of all liver transplants performed in the metropolitan area during the last three years.\n\nThat percentage was virtually identical to the share of liver transplants received by residents of a far smaller, four-zip code area of the city. Unlike the South Bronx and East Harlem, these four areas had relatively high percentages of white residents.\n\nNeither doctors who analyzed the data, nor the transplant centers challenged the data or the series' conclusions.\n\nWhile my research was under way, UNOS officials announced several changes that should make it easier for journalists and others to analyze transplant data. Starting this fall, more recent hospital-by-hospital data is scheduled to be made public by the agency.\n\nOnce UNOS makes the data available, journalists should be able to pursue a wide range of local and national stories on transplant issues like death rates and survival times, as well as race.\n\nKevin McCoy can be reached by e-mail at kmccoy@edit.nydailynews.com",
  "provenance": {
    "extracted_by": "anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-6",
    "extracted_at": "2026-07-05",
    "verified": true
  },
  "similar": [
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      "slug": "1995-june-organ-transplants-tracked-on-line",
      "score": 0.335
    },
    {
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      "score": 0.306
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  "html_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1999-october-transplant-disparity.html",
  "json_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1999-october-transplant-disparity.json"
}