The government has decided to set up online registries for altruistic organ donors as well as patients with end-stage organ failure diseases (primarily liver and kidney diseases) and expand the pool of live donors by encouraging “swap donations” and “chain donations”.
The decision is part of the government’s efforts to strengthen both live and deceased organ donations and rule out the possibilities of commercial trade in organs. Absolute anonymity between altruistic organ donors and recipients will be maintained.
The Cadaver Transplant Advisory Committee (CTAC), which met here on Saturday, approved the draft guidelines regarding the streamlining of altruistic organ donations proposed by the Kerala Network for Organ Sharing (KNOS), the government’s nodal agency for coordinating deceased donor organ donations.
The National Informatics Centre will set up the online registries, which are expected to be functional in April this year. The budget proposal for the same put by the NIC was also approved by the CTAC.
Patients coming before authorisation committees seeking permission for live, unrelated organ transplants often claim that they do have a relative willing to donate organs but that they are unable to do so because of blood and lymphocyte cross-match incompatibility.
Once the online registries of patients and willing donors are created, an “exchange” donation can be arranged by finding another patient who is in a similar situation through a computer-generated algorithm. An exchange or paired donation can be arranged for two patients who might each have a related but incompatible donor by swapping the donor.
Mumbai agency
“Our intention is to prevent organ trade, to overcome organ shortage by encouraging both altruistic non-directed organ donations (organ donations not directed towards any particular individual) and ‘pair’ or ‘exchange’ donations. The KNOS will be aided in this process by the Apex Swap Transplant Registry (ASTR), an agency which coordinates swap donations in Mumbai. To safeguard the interests of living organ donors, the government will periodically follow up altruistic organ donors and ensure their physical and psycho-social well-being through a Web-based application,” a senior health official said.
The KNOS will enter into an MoU with every transplant hospital to effectively run the live organ donation programme. It made the proposals following an order of the High Court on November 24, which directed the government to ensure that only altruistic live organ donations take place and that there is no exploitation of the poor.
