China set to lead world in organ transplant surgery
Print Edition
CHINA is on track to lead the world in organ transplants by 2020 following its abandonment of using organs from executed prisoners, the architect of the country’s transplant program said yesterday.
Huang Jiefu, chairman of the China Organ Donation and Transplantation Committee, told reporters that voluntary civilian organ donations had risen from 30 in 2010, the first year of a pilot program, to more than 5,500 this year.
That will allow around 15,000 people to receive transplants this year, Huang said.
The United States currently leads the world in organ transplants, with about 28,000 people receiving them each year.
Huang said he anticipated that due to the speed of the development of organ donation in China, it will become “the No. 1 country in the world to perform organ transplantation in an ethical way.”
China is seeking to expand the number of willing donors, but has run up against some cultural barriers. Family members are able to block a donation, even if the giver is willing, and many people are adverse to registering as donors by ticking a box on their driver’s license, considering it to be tempting fate.
Instead, authorities are partnering with Alibaba, China’s online shopping platform, to allow people to register in just 10 seconds.
More than 210,000 Chinese have expressed their willingness to become donors, Huang said, though that’s tiny compared with the country’s population of 1.37 billion.
More qualified coordinators and doctors are needed, along with improved connections between the 173 hospitals certified to perform such operations, Huang said. “It’s still a newborn baby, not yet a perfect system.”
Huang said China has adhered to a ban on the use of organs from executed prisoners that came into effect in 2015.
Further moving on from the days when foreigners could fly in with briefcases of cash to receive often risky, no-questions-asked transplants, China has taken measures to stamp out trafficking and “transplant tourism,” including limiting transplants to Chinese citizens.
At a conference at the Vatican In February, Huang submitted an outline for a Chinese-backed task force to look into organ trafficking.
China is hosting a major conference on transplantation in Kunming next month.
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