Independent body on organ transplantation demanded

Gonoshasthaya Kendra trustee Dr Zafrullah Chowdhury on Wednesday demanded amendment to the Transplantation of Human Organs (Amendment) Act 2018 and proposed formulation an independent government body to regulate the organ donation and transplantation activities.

 

Speaking at a press conference at Gonoshasthaya Nagar Hospital in the capital, he said that people often go for illegal organ trading falsifying their relations with the donors as there were some legal constraints.

The existing law stipulates that only close relatives can be a donor of organs and it defines close relatives as parents, children, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives as well as blood-related grandparents, grandchildren, cousins, maternal and paternal uncles, and aunts.

Zafrullah said as the close relatives were not always be found to be donors, rich people were buying organs from the poor falsifying the donors’ identities and that many were going to neighbouring countries to perform the transplantations and draining out huge foreign currencies.

He proposed that no individual hospitals or doctors should be allowed to decide on transplantation from their own but by the regulatory body.

He said anyone willing to donate organs should be given the scope of donating organs upon independently verifying by the regulatory body.

Zafrullah said in the countries like Iran and Canada, only the regulatory body could decide whether the donor should donate organ to any patients.

‘They don’t make it mandatory that only relatives can be donor but they strictly regulate the transplantation and that no individual hospital or doctor can decide their own to transplant anyone’s organ,’ he said.

He said the state authorities themselves in Iran collect organs from donors or dead people and transplant those to them who need those.

‘They need no known donors for getting organ transplantation,’ he said, such mechanism was beneficial for the patients and the country as well.

Zafrullah said provisions of close relatives for donating organs curtailed the rights to people of donating organs or getting organs who did not have close relatives.

‘The provisions were pushing the well-off people to falsify their identities or going abroad to perform transplantation draining out huge currencies,’ he said.

He said that the Bangladesh government was losing foreign currencies worth Tk 8,000 crore every year as well off people were transplanting kidneys from neighbouring countries like India, Sri Lanka and Singapore and the USA.

Kidney transplantation in the USA usually costs Tk 2 to 5 crore while in Sri Lanka and India, it is about Tk 30-40 lakh, he said.

Rgw Bangladesh government can stop draining out the currencies as hospitals in Bangladesh perform the transplantation only at Tk 1.5 lakh to 2.5 lakh per transplantation, Zafrullah said.

He said every year at least 45,000 people suffer from chronic kidney diseases in Bangladesh and only 10,000 of them need transplantation.

‘But due to the provisions of the existing law, people have no way but to take costly dialysis or transplant their kidneys either falsifying here or going abroad,’ he said.

News Courtesy: www.newagebd.net