HOUSE president Demetris Christofias yesterday appealed for more people to take an active role in saving lives by becoming organ donors.
Speaking to reporters at an awards ceremony to honour the three top students who took place in a Nicosia Rotaract Club and Paraskevaidion Surgical and Transplant Centre competition titled ‘Organ donor – life donor’, Christofias called for more live and cadaver donors, making reference to his own personal transplant experience.
“The person who donates his kidney feels very beautiful for the rest of his life because he has a person next to him who he’s been generous to, and… who will be grateful to him for a lifetime and express that gratitude,” he said.
The AKEL party leader underwent a kidney transplant in 1999 after he suffered renal damage during treatment for bronchial pneumonia. His sister, Despina, donated her kidney for the procedure which was carried out at London’s St Mary’s hospital.
Christofias said that unfortunately Cyprus was “behind in the department of organ donation”.
“It is society that has developed a great deal financially but I wonder to what extent development had been accompanied by the proportional development of our wider cultural standards,” he said.
“I’m sorry to note that we fall short on this point and that individuality, greed and the hunt for profit is cultivated more irrespective of whether or not the person next to us is suffering and needs our help.”
During the ceremony the Health Ministry announced it was preparing to launch an awareness campaign to sensitise the public on the topic of organ donation. The campaign which will include television and radio coverage will be made up of lectures and a series of programmes about the issue, a ministry representative said.
A National Committee of Organ Donation had also recently been founded with the purpose of setting state policy and programming awareness campaigns on the subject, the ministry representative added.
Meanwhile Paraskevaidion Surgical and Transplant Centre head George Kyriakides said since the centre’s first procedure in 1986, a total 727 transplants had been carried out, almost two thirds of which involved live donors and 244 were transplants from 127 cadaver donors.
Kyriakides added that Cyprus performed the most kidney transplants per capita in the world, and that 35 Greeks, 23 Turkish Cypriots and a few Arabs had been among the centre’s transplant patients.
The children who were awarded during the ceremony were Ioanna Xenofontos from Limassol’s 1st Technical School and Andreas Kallis and Stelios Stylianou from Nicosia’s 3rd Technical School.
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