WASHINGTON -- The national organ transplant network is asking hospitals to discourage patients from advertising for donors and, if possible, to refuse to perform transplants that arise from these campaigns.

Patients should wait their turn in line, the network says.

The move puts the United Network for Organ Sharing, which matches waiting patients with donated organs, on record against public solicitation aimed at helping a particular person.

It comes after a Houston man, Todd Krampitz, bought a pair of billboards and gave a series of media interviews soliciting a liver donor. It worked: Someone died, and the person's family had heard about Krampitz and opted to donate directly to him.

Normally, when people die, their organs go to whomever is at the top of the waiting list. That list is determined by many factors, including who would obtain the greatest medical benefit from a transplant, who would die soonest without one, and the locations of the patient and donor.

"There's integrity to that. That process is public, it's transparent, it's accountable," said Dr. Mark Fox, chairman of the network's ethics committee.

More than 87,000 people are awaiting organ transplants, and more than 6,000 die each year while on the list.

With Krampitz's success, and attempts by others to emulate it, experts fear that a system designed to treat all patients fairly is being undermined.

The network's action, approved Nov. 18 by a 32-1 vote, was the first official condemnation of this practice. But the statement is not part of the network's official set of policies, and hospitals that might ignore it face no adverse consequences.

That's partly because these sorts of "directed donations" are legal in many states, and the network feared a strong policy statement could have set up conflicts, Fox said. He said those laws were written assuming families would donate to patients they knew, not to someone they read about on a billboard.

The statement is meant to offer hospitals guidance, Fox said. It advises doctors and others involved in transplantation to "reinforce" to the patient or donor family that the "system is designed to allocate organs equitably." If those involved insist on a directed donation, it says, hospitals should "act foremost to ensure equity within the transplant system, with additional consideration of relevant facts, ethical guidelines and applicable laws and allocation policies."