So it appears that a big reason that Dr S has been doing his pioneering operations to combat heart failure using heart stem cells is because there are so few heart transplants performed in Japan.
The first heart transplant in Japan for 30 years was performed in February 1999 following a change in the law to allow organs to be donated on being declared brain-dead rather than only once the heart had stopped as was the case previously.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/287880.stm
However, further legislation was necessary in 2009 to make transplants more widely available as, during the previous year, only 11 heart transplants had been performed in Japan (compared to 2,000 in the USA) and about 400 Japanese would die each year as they were unable to get a heart transplant.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=ajgBoFtYJFKI
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