‘Only .16 in a million donate organs in India’ The proportion of organ donors in the country is among the lowest in the world. Aarti Vij, chief of the Organ Retrieval and Banking Organisation (ORBO) at Delhi’s AIIMS, tells Durgesh Nandan Jha the situation has improved marginally from the past but a great deal needs to be done to ensure more people come forward to donate Every year, two lakh patients require an organ transplant. Not even 10% get it. Why? Organ donation from the brain dead — also referred to as cadaveric donation — is still very low in India. While Spain has 35 organ donors per million people, Britain has 27 donors, US 26 and Australia 11, India’s count stands at a mere 0.16 per million people. Why do you think cadaveric donation has not picked up in India? I won’t say that cadaveric donation has not picked up at all. In 2003, when ORBO was started, we used to get one cadaveric donation in a year or two. Most people, and even some of the medical professionals, did not know about the concept. Today, there is increased awareness and people are coming forward to donate. In the last eight months, since December 2012, families of five brain dead patients have offered us organs which have been used for transplant. India still doesn’t have real time data on the number of patients requiring organs for transplantations or the donors available. Is the health ministry doing something about that? The union health ministry, under the chairmanship of Director General of Health Services Jagdish Prasad, is setting up a central body called National Organ and Tissue Transplantation Organisation to maintain all such data and oversee the transplantation program across the country. Also, the government is coming up with a new law to simplify the organ donation process. What has your organisation done to sensitise people? We have made organ donors like Anmol— the 21-year-old boy whose family donated all his organs after he was declared brain dead in an accident last year — the face of our campaign. Besides, we conduct regular workshops in colleges, hospitals and even among police personnel to sensitise them.
Posted on: Tue, 30 Jul 2013 02:16:14 +0000
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