Crying Need for Awareness on Organ Donation in India: Sir Peter Morris

Sir Peter Morris observed that need of the hour is to spread information about organ donation in India and how exactly a person could go about pledging his or her organs after death.

Sir Peter Morris an authority in organ transplantation and an eminent personality delivered a guest lecture at Christian Medical College and Hospital (CMCH) Ludhiana recently.

Speaking at the gathering he observed that need of the hour is to spread information about organ donation in India and how exactly a person could go about pledging his or her organs after death.

He observed that for the doing so, the strength of celebrities, philanthropists, social workers, politicians and the media should be tapped, to endorse organ donation. Media, he said, is very powerful in India and it should be used to spread the message of organ donation to the masses.

Sir Morris a former president of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, International Transplantation Society, the British Transplantation Society, the International Surgical Society and the European Surgical Association, Sir Peter Morris is presently the Director of the Center for Evidence in Transplantation (CET) in London, which is working to provide high quality, evidence-based information on all aspects of solid organ transplantation. He is currently the Director of the Center for Evidence in Transplantation (CET) in London .He is also a Nuffield Professor of Surgery Emeritus at the University of Oxford.

He also congratulated the related donor kidney transplantation program at CMCH, first successful cadaver renal transplantation started in 1992.

Dr Kim Mammen, Professor and Head of the Department of Urology at the CMCH, revealed that in India there were about 3 million patients with end-stage renal disease, requiring renal replacement therapy. However, only 25,000 patients were lucky enough to get access to hemodialysis and only 2,500 of them were even luckier to have a renal transplant done every year. The Transplantation of Human Organs Act was implemented in 1994 and so far, only 500 cadaver transplants have been done in our country. This he said is very grim picture.

With increasing incidence, of organ failures organ transplants especially renal transplantation offers patients with end-stage kidney disease a new life, both by way of quality and quantity as the kidney donor makes a lifetime contribution for the renal transplant recipient. He added that until a well-organised and popular cadaver renal transplantation program running in India the program should depend on to depend on live donors.

Dr Basant Pawar, Head of the Department of Nephrology, pointed out that diabetes, hypertension and kidney stone disease were the most common causes of kidney failure. The condition could be diagnosed early and treated effectively with medications, hemodialysis and peritoneal dialysis.

All speakers touched about the quality of life for patients with end-stage kidney disease improved dramatically after renal transplantation.

Giving details of the renal transplantation programme, the CMCH Director, Dr John Pramod, reiterated that the hospital had been doing living related kidney transplant operations since 1992 and had thus given a new lease of life to many patients with last-stage kidney disease. The CMCH is also making efforts to propagate cadaver organ donation more popular and has performed four cadaver renal transplant operations since the implementation of the Organ Transplantation Act of 1994, he added.

Later Sir Morris interacted and shared the recent advances in renal transplantation with the professionals in the Urology and Nephrology Departments as well as other transplant surgeons and members of medical fraternity in Ludhiana. He also met all renal transplant patients who had been operated at the CMCH since 1992 and discussed with them their experiences after their renal transplant surgery.

Source-Medindia
SRM