In life, women show a large heart in donating organs to their blood relations, while in death, men are major donors of life giving organs, studies have indicated.

A whopping 80 per cent of living organ donors are women, while a near same percentage of cadaver (brain dead) donors are men, according to G Swarnalatha, incharge of the ‘Jeevandhan’, the Telangana government’s organ transplantation programme. The programme was started in 2013 in the united Andhra Pradesh.

In another study done by the Krishna Institute of Medical Sciences (KIMS), more than 40 per cent of living donors were wives, followed by sister and daughters, comparatively only two per cent of the living donors were husbands

The hospital reached a milestone of 1,000 kidney transplantations at a single centre in the past 15 years.

“Women are most often convinced to donate on the reason that the male members are the bread winners and hence should get priority,” explained Sarabeshwar Sahariah, Chief Transplant Surgeon at KIMS, and among the top surgeon in the country, with over 4,500 transplants to his credit.

In the case of cadaver transplants, which are growing in the country, organs are harvested from people who are declared brain dead. These are often victims of road accidents, and tend to be mostly male.

Families, counselled by medical professionals and organisations like Mohan Foundation, who specialise in promoting organ donations, tend to agree for donations in cases of accident victim say Sahariah and Swarnalatha.

Govt hospitals’ poor record

Under the ‘Jeevandhan’ initiative, a total of 670 organs have been procured and utilised to patients. Significantly, nearly 90 per cent of the transplants have been performed in the corporate hospitals.

The top government hospitals, like the Gandhi, Osmania General and Nizam’s Institute of Medical Sciences have been able to handle less than 10 per cent, since they cannot ensure 24*7 transplant coordinators and Intensive Care Units for the purpose.

Also in some 50 per cent of the cases, when organs are allocated to these government hospitals they are declined because the recipients are not readily traceable, or fit or suffer from some infection at that time, said Swarnalatha in her presentation at KIMS on Sunday to mark the 1000th kidney transplantation.

Stating that the Telangana Government was firm on expanding and strengthening transplantation facilities in the state run hospitals, T Gangadhar said that 26 ICUs have been established in different tertiary hospitals since the formation of the state in 2014. “The budget for healthcare has been increased and is around ₹2,000 crore now. Efforts to educate and promote organ donations is also a priority,” he said in his presentation.

The Transplantation of Human Organs Act of 1994, has gone through several amendments and despite a host of sociological & religious restrictions, the number of organ donations, especially of kidney are steadily growing in the country, though the need to availability ratio is still insignificant.

Published on July 15, 2019