Organ Trafficking Successfully Prevented, Claims Philippines

Poverty forced people in Philippines to sell their kidneys to the rich and foreigners, but this has been successfully prevented, claim health department officials.

Transplants have plunged since 2008 when the health department launched a crackdown on kidney trafficking, said Ernesto Vera of the health department's National Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.

Dialysis - Hemodialysis, Peritoneal Dialysis and Role of Diet and Drugs
Dialysis is an artificial process for removing excess water and waste from the blood. Hemodialysis and peritoneal dialysis are the types of dialysis.

"It has stopped, that much is clear," Vera said, referring to kidney trafficking.

Hospital data compiled by the Philippine Society for Nephrology, a group of kidney doctors, showed transplants dived from 1,046 in 2007 to 679 in 2008 as the government banned foreigners from receiving organs from Filipino donors.

Transplants fell further to 511 last year, and last month the health department further tightened the rules. Living donors are now banned from giving their kidneys to Filipino recipients who are not their relatives.

Acute Renal (Kidney) Failure- Causes, Symptoms, Diagnosis, Treatment and Complications
Acute renal failure is the sudden cessation of the functioning of kidneys, that can be due to reduced renal blood flow, damage to renal tissues.

However, medics and the government said the crackdown on trafficking had done nothing to help alleviate the dire shortage of kidneys for the many Filipinos who require a transplant.

Seven thousand Filipinos -- nearly one every hour -- still die of renal failure every year, according to government data.

About Transplantation
Since the early times, the novel idea of transplanting tissues and other body parts from one organism to the other has captured the imagination of successive generations.

The government is counting on an organ donor registry, to be launched in about three months, to address the problem.

Just 65 Philippine patients received kidney transplants from dead donors last year, Vanessa de Villa, head of a health department working group on organ donation rules, told an industry forum.

Information Sharing Before Transplantation Finds No Consensus
Research indicates that kidney donors and recipients are in favor of exchanging personal health information that may influence success before scheduling a living organ donor transplant

Benjamin Balmores, president of the kidney doctors' group, said diabetes and hypertension were the top two causes of kidney failure in the Philippines.

Source-AFP