Surgeons are taking lungs, kidneys and livers from cancer victims because of the acute shortage of organ donors.

Official guidelines state that organs should not normally be taken from donors with a history of cancer, because there is a small risk of a tumour.

However, one of Britain’s leaders in the transplant field has disclosed that the advice is being ignored and says surgeons must be prepared to take more organs from this source.

Professor Peter Friend, president of the British Transplantation Society, said surgeons must weigh up the possible dangers against the real benefits.

Friend, also director of transplantation at Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals NHS Trust, said: “If we had plenty of organs and we just had to wait until tomorrow for the best one to turn up then that would be fine, we could say ‘no risk please’.

“I suspect there are a lot of potential donors with a history of cancer, perhaps in the distant past, who have been turned down. We need to say, ‘What is the reason to discount these people?’”

In the past two years 195 organs have been taken from 67 donors who died of cancer, or who suffered from the disease earlier in their lives, according to figures from UK Transplant, the transplantation agency. Seventeen of those donors died from brain tumours.

There are a record 8,000 patients awaiting a transplant, of whom about 400 a year die. However, a proposal by Gordon Brown and Sir Liam Donaldson, the chief medical officer for England, to introduce a system of “presumed consent” is unlikely to be approved.

A report commissioned by the government, to be published tomorrow by the Organ Donation Taskforce, is expected to advise against any arrangement under which organs are removed after death unless an individual has recorded a wish to opt out.

Donaldson criticised the decision. “People are dying, people are suffering and many people are living on a knife edge of despair, waiting for a phone call that never comes,” he says in a newspaper today.

Under guidance drawn up by the Council of Europe, surgeons should not normally take organs from donors with a history of cancer. An exception is made for some non- aggressive brain cancers as they do not usually spread outside the central nervous system, so are unlikely to affect organs for transplant. The risk of a donor with brain cancer passing on the disease through a donated organ is one in 200.

The guidance also says that if biopsies of the tumour have not been taken to assess the chance of the cancer spreading, the donor should be rejected. Our organs are not for Brown to snatch, Minette Marrin, page 18

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