There is a stark gender bias in the number of live kidney donations in the State. Of the 4,245 live donations in the past five years, women constitute 63%. However, in terms of recipients, men make up 79%.
Of the nearly 700 kidney transplantations in the State a year, about 5% on an average are through deceased organ donation. The rest are live kidney donations, apparently altruistic. It does raise a question whether women are being exploited in a subtle manner for making altruistic live-related donations, a senior health officer told The Hindu .
Family pressures and money transactions in live-related and live-unrelated donations need to be brought under the scanner, he said.
He said the medical board that had to sanction unrelated live donations would check whether any financial transactions were involved and question the donor on why he/she was donating the organ. There were no checks on the relationship between the donor and the recipient. There were also no proper follow-ups on the health of either the donor or the recipient, as per the government data. A transplant surgeon at a private hospital, on conditions of anonymity, said there were follow-ups as long as the recipient of live-related donation was alive. There were none in the case of unrelated live donors.
A senior transplant surgeon believed that women definitely were more willing to donate whether it was for husband or for children.
“The fact remains that more men than women are afflicted by kidney and liver ailments that may end up as terminal stage diseases,” he added. In the case of live-unrelated donors, the number of women and men queuing up for donation was almost equal, he said.
There were more kidney transplantations in the State, as per information available via a right to information plea. It was also found that no data were available with the government on the rejection rate, follow-ups on recipients and donors, number of second kidney transplantations, and the survival rate.
Though live kidney transplantations are being carried out for nearly 20 years in the State, deceased organ donations picked up only when the State stepped in 2012. The numbers went up dramatically for four years till a case came up in courts questioning brain-death certification. The number of organ donations dropped dramatically from 132 in 2016 to 34 in 2017 and just 14 in 2018. After the courts asked the government to review the process of brain-death certification and much awareness creation on the part of the government, the number of deceased donors went up to 34 in 2019.
Private hospitals have stopped taking an active role in organ donation after accusations were raised about the veracity of brain-deaths.
