Despite the passage of the ‘Transplantation of Human Organs and Tissues Act, 2010’, it appears that the business of selling organs and avoiding legal means to transplant these, when they are required by patients, continues. According to the president of the Pakistan Transplant Society, around 1,000 renal transplantations take place in Pakistan every year. Of these, around 500 are illegal. In other words, they have most likely been paid for, by hiring a poorer person to sell his or her organ to be placed in the body of a wealthier person who requires it. The transplantation law passed more than 10 years ago makes it clear that there is to be no payment when an organ is transplanted, and that transplant can only be accepted from blood relatives or otherwise from persons who are deceased or brain dead.
It is obvious, as the PTS President emphasised, that the only way to deal with the situation is to promote donations by persons who are deceased so that the shortage of organs which drives the process of acquiring illegal donations can be stopped in the country or at least reduced. To do so we require a huge awareness and persuasion drive, given that families are often reluctant to allow the organs of relatives who have passed away to be removed from their bodies. Organ donation is of course far more common in many other countries. Cards which allow a person to proclaim himself or herself an organ donor can be carried so that in the case of sudden death staff and relatives know that the person who has deceased recently wishes to give life and meaning to others by donating kidneys, a liver, a cornea or other organ for which the transplantation process exists in Pakistan.
More and more people around the world have recognised that giving the gift of life to someone who would not be able to live without an organ is a sacrifice that is worth making. It is time we thought more seriously about the matter and about following the law passed in 2010, mainly through the valiant efforts of Sindh Institute of Urology and Transplantation (SIUT). We need to move towards developing means where people who have passed away can give something to those who still live and struggle for life due to organ failure.