With a year-on-year increase, the State’s cadaver organ donation programme, Jeevandan, crossed the 500-donor mark recently, but the demand for organs continues a steeper climb.
In the five years since its launch, Jeevandan has managed to get organs from 500 brain-dead donors, most being victims of road accidents, while rest of the deaths occurred due to intra-cranial bleeding. Donated organs have benefited recipients who failed find a live-donor match, in the case of kidney and liver. Heart and corneal transplants are mainly driven by cadaver organs.
The number of people registering for organ donations has increased over the years, Jeevandan officials say. In the past two years, the number went well past 100 annually, and this year, more than 50 persons have already donated organs. Increased awareness and pledges by celebrities to donate organs have pushed more people towards donation after death, but the number of recipients waiting for a cadaver kidney has now gone past 1,900.
The government is said to be mulling a registry to facilitate more swap transplants, where a match is found outside the permitted circle of living donors, but Telangana is yet to adopt the 2011 amendment to Transplantation of Human Organs Act to give wings to its swap transplants policy. As of now, the government considers every potential case of swap transplant at the highest level before passing an order permitting it.
Jeevandan has seen also the biggest rise in contributions by O+ donors. The need for organs from O+ blood group donors is also greater than other ABO blood groups. As liver transplants become common, the demand for donor livers is also on the rise. Liver is the second most common organ harvested from a cadaver. In the past five years, over 2,000 people have registered under the programme to receive a liver.
The rise in donations and transplants is being propelled by large, multi-centre private hospitals, while the numbers remain relatively small at government hospitals, despite public health institutions handling more number of accident trauma cases compared to private institutions. Experts say facilitates at public hospitals have to be extensively improved before donations and transplant procedures can increase.
