INCREASING demand for transplants and an acute lack of donors in Cyprus could lead to illegal trading in human organs, a top doctor said yesterday.
The Director of the Paraskevaideon Surgical and Transplant Foundation, Dr Georgios Kyriakides, told the Sunday Mail that Cyprus had the largest number of kidney transplantations in the world per population, calculated at 60 transplants per million people per year.
There has already been one case of a patient buying kidneys from Lebanon, Kyriakides said, and warned that the illegal trade in human organs was a worldwide problem that demanded serious attention.
He called for new legislation that would establish a registry of organ donors, like in Britain, giving the opportunity for those who wish to register voluntarily to do so. In such cases, doctors would not need to seek consent from the family of the deceased.
There are 150 people urgently awaiting organ transplants in Cyprus; 120 of those are for kidneys, which is the sole form of transplant operation available on the island. Kyriakides warned that the number of patients needing new organs was increasing steadily but the lack of public awareness about organ donation meant that there was a serious shortage of organs.
Since 1986, 516 transplant operations have been performed in Cyprus: 314 organs were used from living donors and 202 from recently deceased bodies (cadaveric donations).
“Cadaveric donations are vital for many people who don’t have the option of a living donor for lack of suitability, availability and many other reasons,” Kyriakides said. “These donations are taken from brain-dead patients whose respiration is provided by mechanical means. Legally, scientifically and ethically they are considered deceased.”
He stressed that of the 120 or so fatal accidents that occur each year, at least 15 of those could be used to save someone else’s life. At present, six or seven cadaveric donors are used annually.
Because of the medical care available, organ transplants have a 95 per cent success rate in the first year. This falls slightly to 80 per cent in the 10th year.
The ‘Fourth European Day of Organ Donation and Transplantation’ will be held in Nicosia on October 5. International experts will be giving seminars and lectures on organ transplants at the Hilton Hotel.
The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.
