GO OUT AND DONATE

Around three decades ago, India was a nation completely deficient of voluntary donors of blood. Whenever there was a need to do surgery or operation blood had to be bought from people and you can also call that a barter system of blood, but this system apparently led to huge losses of life of poor people who succumbed to their injuries or disease as a result of not being able to pay the money required to buy blood.

Fortunately today the whole situation has transformed into a better. Today more than 40 lakh units are available for the needy people thus saving the lives of so many innocuous people on the earth. And the same needs to be done for organ donation.

The most important thing is to change people’s perspective about the whole situation. Around 30 years ago, people used to believe that blood donation was an unholy process and myths in the mind of people averred so many virtual and unauthentic side effects that most of the people declined this practice but today the situation has changed completely. With so many awareness programmes and drives today India is having a large number of people who are donating their blood for a better cause. Today the same needs to be done with organ donation.

Today there is a critical gap between the supply and demand of the organs. Today the number of those wanting organs remains to be high while the number of donors available for the purpose continues to constitute a meagre proportion of the population thereby leading to death of so many of those who could have survived  if they would have got organ transplants at the right time.

Let’s first talk about Kidney transplantation in India. Kidney transplantation in India started in the 1980s. At that time it was just a type of business in which poor people donated (not at all) their kidney to rich people in exchange for money and therefore only the rich could afford to buy the kidney and lakhs of paupers were made to die. Even the laws allowed the same and finally all this resulted in corruption by doctors and also illegitimate export of kidneys to western countries.

It was not until 1994 when the law was mutated and a new organ transplantation act was enacted to stop illegal organ trading and focussed on making organ transplantation for the poor and middle class.

But still the execution of the above mentioned step taken by the judicial services remains completely poor due to some reasons.

The first is that there are a lot of those waiting for transplants but not many people are there for donation. At present 1,50,000 people want a kidney transplant but still only 40,000 donors are there. Ever year our nation requires 4 crore units of blood but only 40 Lakh units of blood are available to the people. All this creates a huge situation of turmoil in the whole nation and at last because of such a great shortfall between the number of those wanting organs and number of those donating , the rich at last is at the receiving end while the poor is nowhere there or is just made to donate his organs due to lack of money.

The second thing is the high cost of transplantations. In India more than 95% of liver transplants are done in private hospitals which demand 16-24 lakhs per transplant. With post-transplant costs of about Rs. 10,000 per month for immunosuppressive drugs to restrain your body from rejecting the new organs, also exacerbated the problems of people thereby making it only an affair of rich people.  

The other thing is that in India even families of deceased people are not ready to donate their organs just because of some myths. In India only 5% transplantations are from deceased donors while in the western countries the figure is of about 80%.

So now the question that comes in front of us is how can we make the organ transplantation affordable for poor.

First of all we need to destroy the myths in people’s mind about organ donation. A large part of Indian population continues to be illiterate and therefore have no idea about the process of organ transplantation and have a myth that if they donate their organs (even after death) God will never forgive them. It is true that such things really exist in India. But now a change needs to be effected in the nation. These people need to be told that even in our mythology organ transplantation is there. Rishi Dadichi once donated his bones to make weapons out of them.  While on the other hand, some drives and awareness programs also need to be commenced in order to change people’s perspective about the whole situation.

The second step that we need to take up is with the brain dead people. Families of brain dead people believe that if the person’s heart is beating, there are chances of him getting recovered and therefore never donate the patients organs. But today doctors and other authorities should take up the initiative in order to tell the families of brain dead people about their exact position and ask them to donate the organs of the patient. More than 50 people can be saved by tissue donors and organ donors can save upto the life of around 8 people. Isn’t that amazing that so many people would turn over a new lease of life through the help of brain dead patients. That surely can serve that purpose.

 In order to expedite the process of organ transplantation, India need to educate its people and also make tougher laws in order to stop illegal trading of organs and to make the transplantation affordable to the poor people.

JAI HIND, JAI BHARAT

JAI MA BHARTI