The Hindu : Karnataka / Bangalore News : Cadaver organ donation programme to get a push

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Oct 06, 2007
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Karnataka

Karnataka - Bangalore

Cadaver organ donation programme to get a push

Staff Reporter

Organ Retrieval
and Banking Organisation to
be strengthened

BANGALORE: Changes to the Transplantation of Human Organs Act 1994 (THO Act) were in the final stages of implementation, to make trading in organs, mainly kidneys, difficult, and to facilitate a push for the cadaver organ donation programme, Harsh Jauhari, leading consultant and transplant surgeon, said here on Friday.

Dr. Jauhari, a member of the Review Committee of the Ministry of Health, constituted by the Delhi High Court to review the provisions of the THO Act, was speaking at a forum on the ethics of organ transplantation at the 23rd annual conference of the Indian Society of Organ Transplantation.

Dr. Jauhari said strengthening the Organ Retrieval and Banking Organisation (ORBO) creating at least six more ORBO centres and actively promoting the cadaver organ donation programme would be the main thrust of the proposed changes to the THO Act. To give thrust to the cadaver organ donation programme, hospitals with ICUs would be certified as organ retrieval centres, and appointment of transplant coordinators at all transplant centres would be mandatory.

Brain-death certification and grief-counselling would have to be actively pursued by hospitals to take the programme forward, he said.

Round-the-clock

Post-mortem which was now conducted only during the day would be facilitated to be performed round-the-clock, so that organ harvesting could be speeded up.

Sudarshan Ballal, Director, Manipal Institute of Nephrology and Urology, said cadaver organ transplants accounted for less than 0.5 per cent of all kidney transplantations in India. “Kidney transplantation is mired in ugly controversies and inconsistent regulation by the Government,” he said.

Gabriel M. Danovitch, Medical Director, Kidney Transplant Programme, UCLA Medical Centre, Los Angeles, California, spoke against paid live organ donation, saying it was not only illegal, but recognised by all stakeholders as being inimical to the cause of cadaver transplant programme in the U.S. and elsewhere in the West.

In the U.S., the cadaver programme was successful mainly because the dialysis care delivery system was very efficient.

There had been an unprecedented increase in the number of live related organ donation as well as cadaver donation, thanks to the Government’s decision to invest generously in the programme, in terms of money and social inputs, Dr. Danovitch added.

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