London Eminent British heart surgeon Sir Magdi Yacoub warned that public anxiety in the wake of the Alder Hey organ scandal was threatening life-saving transplant operations, *****The Times***** newspaper reported on Saturday.

Britons were outraged last week by a government report detailing how pathologists at the Liverpool hospital systematically stripped organs and other body parts from 2,000 dead children without parental consent.

Yacoub told *****The Times***** there had been no organ transplant operations performed at the Royal Brompton Hospital in London since the report was released.

"There are a large number of patients who will almost certainly die if this trend continues," Yacoub was quoted as saying by *****The Times*****.

Organ Transplant Organizations also expressed concern at the situation.

UK transplant, which matches organ donors with recipients, said the last week had been quiet, with only two organ donors throughout Britain and Ireland, the paper said.

Yacoub spoke out as one of his patients, a baby girl, lay desperately ill in Royal Brompton Hospital, waiting for a new heart.

Staff at the hospital said they normally would have expected a donor by now and feared public anxiety was threatening the country's transplant program, *****The Times***** said.

Transplant support network Chairman Phil Hatton told the paper that people needed to be reassured that the Alder Hey situation was quite different from the procedures for taking organs for transplant.

Dick van Velzen, the Dutch pathologist at the center of the Alder Hey scandal was suspended from the British Medical Register on Friday.

The General Medical Council (GMC) decided at an emergency meeting that Van Velzen should not be allowed to work as a doctor in Britain. (Reuters)