Tamil Nadu tops in organ donation

Courtesy & Thanks : The HINDU (Source)

“Tamil Nadu's organ donation rate a model for country”

The country's target would be to reach Tamil Nadu' s rate of cadaveric organ donation of 1.3 per million people within the next two years, R.K. Srivastava, Director General of Health Services, Government of India, said here on Saturday.

At present the country's rate was 0.3 per million, and it is essential to bring the country level with Tamil Nadu, which was leading the nation in terms of cadaver organ transplantation, he added. “This is certainly going to require tremendous efforts. However if even one per cent of the patients in the hospitals who are brain dead can be declared as such, and the potential for organ donation tapped, we can reach 1.3 per million,” Dr. Srivastava said. The nation would have to go into ‘mission mode' to achieve this.

The DGHS was speaking at Samsaara (Circle of Life), a symposium on Organ Donation Awareness and Brain death organized jointly by his office, the Tamil Nadu Cadaver Transplant Programme, and Mohan Foundation.

Putting in place systems that will facilitate organ donation is at the core of increasing the number of cadaveric organs available for transplantation, he added. This is evident from Tamil Nadu, and even nations that have done much better, having reached a rate of 30/40 per million population. Even in these nations, there continued to be a scarcity of organs, with the number of people requiring life-saving organ transplantation's always being higher than the number of organs available, Dr. Srivastava explained. This makes the task of spreading awareness crucial and continuous.

Earlier, he released a ‘brain-death manual' and inaugurated the one-year PG diploma course for transplant co-ordinators, to be conducted by Mohan Foundation in association with IGNOU.

Mayilvahanan Natarajan, Vice-Chancellor, Tamil Nadu Dr. MGR Medical University, said the programme would have to include bone as an organ that can be harvested and transplanted. Awareness would have to be built on this concept too, he added. Most people think donating the bone means taking away the hand or leg, but that is not so, the Vice-Chancellor clarified.

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Courtesy & Thanks : Times of India (Source)

Tamil Nadu leads country in organ donation

CHENNAI: When the state government honoured a couple who donated the organs of their teenaged son Hitendran in 2008, the state health department did not think that it would mark the beginning of a spurt of organ donation in the state.

The central registry for organ donation, formed on September 22, 2008, has recorded 120 transplants in the last one year, the highest in the country so far. Though states across the country have several people pledging organs, Tamil Nadu has managed to get families of the brain dead to sign the mandatory form giving permission to harvest vital organs, including heart, kidneys and liver. Besides these, there were 48 cornea, 26 heart valve and one skin donation. The registry even managed to touch base with neighbouring states like Karnataka from where one heart and three livers were harvested and brought to the city.

However, barring one donation from Stanley Medical College, none of the donations came from a government hospital. All other donations came from brain deaths recorded in private hospitals, including Apollo Hospitals, Chennai, Madurai Meenakshi Mission and Christian Medical College, Vellore, according to the webpage maintained by the Directorate of Medical and Rural Health Services. The government hospitals have done just three liver transplants and a few kidney transplants. They have no facilities to do heart transplants.

Registry co-ordinator Dr J Amalorpavanathan refused to comment on why no donations were made from the government hospitals. "In the last one year, we have improved a lot. We still have a long way to go. We are working towards that," he said.

But government hospital doctors admit that they don't even record brain deaths, the first step in the list of procedures for organ donation.

Brain death is the irreversible end of all brain activity (including involuntary activity necessary to sustain life) due to loss of blood flow and oxygenation. The patient is clinically dead and vital organs are supported by a life support system. The Transplantation of Human Organs Act permits doctors to harvest healthy vital organs like the eyes, heart, kidneys, lung and liver and transplant them to ailing patients.

In January 8, 2008, a government order from the state health department empowered the three government-run medical college hospitals in the city to declare brain deaths. Since then a series of government orders were passed by the health department to promote organ donation. Stanley Medical College Hospital was even given an exclusive five-bed ward for brain-dead patients.

"Most cases we see are accident victims, and the bodies have to undergo autopsy. To do a post-mortem all internal organs are required. What do we do if forensic experts accuse us of having destroyed evidence? That's why we don't immediately record brain deaths," said a senior neurologist at the Government General Hospital. "What we need is a GO to tell us what we should do in such circumstances. That order has been pending for more than eight months," he said.

Other doctors complain that they do not get remuneration equivalent to those in the private sector. "Private hospitals waive the hospital fee for the donor and charge recipients up to Rs 25 lakh for a liver transplant. We get nothing more than our salary for the marathon surgery," he said.

Health secretary VK Subburaj said, "We have been working towards getting all the legal hurdles removed for organ donation. In fact, we are also looking at setting our target at 500 donations next year. If we do that, we can eventually even reduce the number of live donations by several times," he said.