Hundreds of U.K. patients are now walking around with kidneys they received that were rejected more than once by other hospitals - without their knowledge.
Some 300 British patients weren't told the organs, from deceased donors, were previously rejected by at least three other hospitals, The Telegraph reported.
News of the rejected kidneys comes after two patients died following kidney transplants. The kidneys were infected with parasites, the newspaper reported.
The hundreds of kidneys are part of a "fast track" scheme, where the organs would be transplanted after they had been rejected by three hospitals if the donor died from cardiac arrest or by five hospitals if the person was brain dead.
Doctors inform patients about any problems the kidney may have, but they don't feel obligated to disclose the rejections.
"We wouldn't necessarily say how many places and why they had been turned down," Anthony Warrens, president of the British Transplantation Society, said according to the newspaper. "For me the criteria is, what are the relevant facts that the patient needs to have?"
The reality of the situation, doctors say, is that there are not enough kidney donors to go around, forcing them to rely on "second-hand organs." But the kidneys aren't just randomly assigned- if a hospital receives a kidney from a 73-year-old donor, for instance, it may go to a 69-year-old patient instead of a younger one.
Patients are sometimes faced with the choice of improving their health with a less-than perfect kidney or risk waiting for a better one.
"The advice might be 'It's not perfect, but it's the best you're going to get,'" Warrens said according to The Telegraph. "You have to have a degree of realism about it.
"These are second-hand organs," he added. "They've been in someone's body for years."
A scandal ensued when the two male patients died in 2013 after receiving the parasite-infested kidneys at the University Hospital of Wales.
Doctors thought the donor died from meningitis, but it was later determined the man died from the parasite infection. A coroner later cleared the doctors of culpability in the deaths, the newspaper reported.
The U.K.'s NHS said the survival rate is no worse with "fast track" kidneys.
But "that doesn't mean that function is as good. The probability is that long-term survival is likely to be lower," Warrens said.
