HYDERABAD: The recent incident in the city where a man found one of his kidneys missing has turned the spotlight once again on a possible organ sale racket in the city.

Many in the medical field feel abysmally low levels of public awareness on organ transplantation could probably be feeding organ swindlers.

The large list of patients waiting for different organs, coupled with lack of coordinated efforts from the Government and hospitals to help them, and absence of strict Government monitoring could be helping racketeers, they say.

Proactive measures

However, the situation can be dealt with through a few proactive steps, observes Prashant Joshi, CEO of the Multi-Organ Harvesting Aid Network (MOHAN Foundation), the only organisation working in this sector in the city right now.

Mr. Joshi says that MOHAN Foundation has forwarded a few suggestions to the President of India and the Centre to make the sector transparent and to help those in need of organs.

A separate list has been submitted to the Andhra Pradesh Government as well.

`Amend Act'

"An aggressive campaign by Governments, imparting organ donation a `mission' status and priority on a par with anti-AIDS and polio missions can make a big difference. Inclusion of chapters on organ donation in the 10+2 curriculum and for social welfare PG students can help in building awareness," he says.

Minor changes in the Andhra Pradesh's Organ Transplantation Act can help hundreds of desperate patients.

"This can be done by making declaration of brain death mandatory for all hospitals and trauma care centres; making it compulsory for hospitals to explain brain death and organ donation concepts to relatives of patients; permitting organ retrieval at trauma centres by approved surgeons; allowing simultaneous organ retrieval and post-mortem; and permission to use unclaimed brain-dead bodies as potential donors after 36 hours of brain death declaration," Mr. Joshi, himself a recipient of a cadaver kidney six years ago, says.

Need for changes

The fact that there were only three recorded cadaver transplants in the city along with the more disturbing fact that three persons died here waiting for organs in the last calendar year emphasises the need for more changes in the working of the transplantation network as well.

Encouraging more hospitals to become members in the cadaver sharing network and simultaneously discouraging hospitals from carrying out individual cadaver transplants of particular organs for their own patients, thus wasting other organs will be a major step, he says.

A central registry of waiting patients can also change the scenario, he notes. MOHAN Foundation has suggested to the President and the Centre the setting up of a national council for cadaver organ donation and transplantation.

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