BackOnly 23% of donated organs are transplanted to needy patients: health ministry
Anupriya Patel, minister of state for health, says there is a need to promote cadaver or deceased organ donation rather than relying on living donors in order to avoid the risk of commercial trading of organs
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New Delhi: Depicting the sorry state of affairs of organ donation and transplants in India, data from the ministry of health reveals that only 23% of donated organs are transplanted to needy patients. Mainly living donors are donating organs while retrieval from the brain dead is not picking up, the ministry said on Wednesday.
“There is a need to promote cadaver or deceased organ donation rather than relying on living donors in order to avoid the risk of commercial trading of organs and also to avoid the inherent risk to the health of the living donor. There is a need to spread awareness in the community at large that a living person can save the life of only one person but a deceased or cadaver organ donor can save up to 9 lives by donating vital organs," Anupriya Patel, minister of state for health said.
There have been many challenges before the government to get dead donors and fully utilise the donated organs. “Apart from promoting organ donation, it is also important to improve the infrastructure and capacity of government hospitals to undertake transplantation so that the poor and needy could benefit," Patel said.
The government has been trying to fill the gap between demand and supply and quality assurance in the availability of various tissues. On Wednesday, the National Biomaterial Centre (National Tissue Bank) at the National Organ and Tissue Transplant Organization (NOTTO) in Safdarjung Hospital was made functional. The national level tissue bank aims to fulfil the demands of tissue transplantation including procurement, storage and fulfil distribution of biomaterials.
The National Tissue Bank will take care of the tissue allograft that includes bone and bone products e.g. deep frozen bone allograft (a tissue graft from a donor of the same species as the recipient but not genetically identical), freeze dried bone allograft, dowel allograft, antigen-extracted allogeneic (AAA) Bone, duramater (a membrane), facialata (thigh muscles), fresh frozen human amniotic membrane, high temperature treated board cadaveric joints like knees, hips and shoulders, cadaveric cranium bone graft, loose bone fragment, different types of bovine allograft, used in orthodontics, skin graft, cornea, heart valves and vessels.
“For fully utilising the donated organs, we need a strong network and communication system in between the hospitals, organs and tissue banks. There organ and tissue donation has been very low in India. While we already have very less number of donors, we are also not able to use the donated organs properly due to various reasons," said Rajesh Malhotra, chairperson, Bone Bank at NOTTO and head of the orthopaedics department at All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi.
“As far as bones are concerned, we started a bone bank in AIIMS, but we barely received two patients a year for bone donation. In last 18 years we could get 250 bone as we collect over 8 bones from a donor," he said.
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