Methodist University Hospital confirms Steve's liver transplant

You know that "no iphone news" button at the top? Yeah. Can I get a "no Steve news" button? That'd be sweet. KTHXBAI

Not your business, not the shareholders' business, not anyone's business but his and his family's.

I may be alone when I say this, and I love my iPhone and MacBook Pro but... Do we really care? Why not write an article next time he sneezes too. He might have a cold!

Get a life people

Ive should of just designed him an iLiver.

Personally, I hope that the Wall Street Journal or the two journalists who initially reported on the story get sued into oblivion, and that the hospital attendant who outed the information gets a giant HIPAA smack over the face and then fired.

The initial report mentioned nothing about Steve Jobs giving anyone permission to mentioned anything about this. Furthermore it was during his medical leave, so it is on the whole immaterial.

This sort of private matter shouldn't be discussed. It is disgusting, and the WSJ should be utterly ashamed of themselves.

I am not too familiar with the topic but, is it really okay for a hospital to talk about what patients got what procedures and for what reason?

It has been interesting in the Memphis tech community dealing with the news of it happening right here at Methodist.

Please point me to all the other press releases where CEO announce they have health issues! The crowd say, "But Steve Jobs is more important to Apple, than other CEOs are to their companies". I say, then why are other companies paying them 10s of millions (and sometimes multiples of that) of dollars in salary then!!

I'm a physician and I wanted to add my two cents here. In the past, a patient's status for a liver transplant was determined using the "Childs-Pugh" score. This system could allow for certain subjective symptoms such as severity of ascites (fluid build-up in the abdomen) or encephalopathy (altered mental status from liver failure) to effect where a person was on the list. The fact that these subjective factors were used led to some transplant centers getting their patients to the head of the list ahead of sicker patients.

Due to this, a new system based on the "MELD Score" (Model for End Stage Liver Disease) was created. This system is soley based on objective laboratory findings and involves a complex calculation based on a) INR (how thin your blood is - your liver creates the proteins that allows your blood to clot), b) creatinine - a measure of how your kidneys are working - liver failure can lead to kidney failure; and c) Total Bilirubin - one of the substances the liver normally clears when it is working well but doesn't when it is failing. This score which ranges from 6-40 determines your place on the list.

So, there are basically two scenarios - either Steve was very, very sick - much sicker then anyone would have predicted when he first went out on leave OR he has a less common blood type. If Steve had a less common blood type such as type A or B (O is the most common) this could have led to a situation where there was a liver available in his blood type and there was no one sicker then him with that blood type. This issue can be a double-edged sword as there are also fewer donors from less common blood type groups.

I would say the only way a billionaire could game the system in the US would be to move to a region (organ transplant is handled regionally) where the wait was shorter. There are many excellent transplant centers in California - I just suspect the wait is longer there (or Steve's obsession with privacy came into play). This practice is not unusual or limited to billionaires, though the travel expenses can be very high - he will need to keep going back for follow-ups.

The first sentence is a bit misleading; what happened last week was the Wall Street Journal's report, not Steve's transplant.

Here's a suggested rewrite:

"While the Wall Street Journal reported late last week that Steve Jobs had a liver transplant two months ago, we still haven't..."