Seventy-one year old Sovana Sarkar’s last wish was that her organs be donated. So in June this year when she suffered a cardiac arrest and slipped into deep coma in Kolkata, her 84-year-old husband and son ran from pillar to post for four day to get all the necessary clearances. Her kidneys, liver and corneas were donated and four people will have a better live because of her last wish.
On Friday afternoon traffic came to a halt in Mumbai for 20 minutes to create a corridor for transporting organs from Lilavati hospital in Bandra to Fortis Hospital in Mulund. The heart went to a 55-year-old doctor while the liver was split between a child and a man. The organs were harvested from the body of 32-year-old Santosh Pandey who suffered a stroke and was declared brain dead.
This was possible, thanks to the advances in cadaver transplant techniques.
There is a chance that Goa too will hear stories of brave and courageous families like the two mentioned above. The ground work for setting up a cadaver transplant unit is already underway at the Goa Medical College. Necessary permissions have been received, training of personnel is underway and a proposal has been sent to the government for setting up a tissue typing laboratory, a crucial link in the organ donation chain.
The technique is complex and so is the maze or rules and regulations that have to be in place to prevent misuse. India is used to reading stories of kidney rackets wherein live donors are tricked into parting with an organ. The effort to stop such practices has not been successful. According to the WHO, despite a ban, the Indian organ market is “still existent and resurging”. The Voluntary Health Association of India, a non-profit health group has estimated that around 2,000 Indians sell their kidneys every year. There are about two lakh persons on the waiting list for a kidney and only three percent receive one. T Rajkumar Rao built a Rs 75 crore empire by tricking 15,000 debt-ridden farmers into donating an organ. He was finally apprehended by the police, but the ease with which he did business for over two decades points to the loopholes in the regulatory system. Hence the level of scrutiny required for cadaver transplants is even higher.
It was in February that the GMC was registered as an institution that could undertake cadaver transplants and inclusion in the National Organ Tissue Transplant Organisation was an important step. This gives GMC the legal cover to go ahead, but for the transplants to become a reality the government will have to step in and do some hand holding. The BJP government is credited with starting a cardiac unit in the GMC and the next progressive step would be to set up the tissue typing lab. The job of this lab is to match donor organs to recipients without with the body could reject the organ.
The success rate of cadaver transplants depends on how fast the organs can be transported and an NOC from the family. The State has a decent network or roads, but there are times when traffic snarls on major bridges and in cities could hold up transportation. Close coordination between hospitals and transport authorities coupled with awareness on the need to donate one’s organs will eventually determine the success rate of transplants.
