AN 83-year-old man has achieved a double first in the world of medicine by becoming the oldest person in the UK to donate a kidney and becoming the oldest person in the country to give a kidney to a stranger.

Nicholas Crace, a widower and former charity director from Overton, near Alresford, is one of a rare group of people known as "altruistic donors" – someone who gives a kidney, through the NHS, to a person whom they do not know and have never met, but who is on the waiting list for an organ. The NHS allocates their kidney to the next suitable recipient.

Mr Crace said: "I knew that 7,000 people are waiting for a kidney and that one person dies almost every day while waiting.

"I couldn't have lived with myself in the knowledge that I had had the chance of changing someone's life and turned it down."

For full story, see this week's Alton Herald.