DISY deputy Nicos Tornaritis said yesterday he was planning to propose a bill that would force all Cypriots to donate their organs for transplant purposes, unless they specifically requested to be exempted.
According to Dr. George Kyriakides, who heads the Paraskevaidion Surgical and Transplant Foundation in Nicosia, 120 patients are waiting for kidneys, 10 more are waiting for livers and a further 10 are waiting for hearts. All they need to give them another 15-25 years of life is a transplant.
Because of the shortage of organ donors on the island, Tornaritis wants to table a bill that will allow doctors automatically to remove any organs from a cadaver that they deem usable.
This proposal comes after reports that the Paraskevaidion Foundation, up until three weeks ago, had not had a single cadaver organ donation for 14 months.
Kyriakides said Cyprus normally had an average of eight cadaver donors per year, but that this could vary at any time because of the lack of potential candidates.
“You need brain dead patients that have basically been killed in car accidents, but their vital organs are kept alive through artificial respiration” he told the Cyprus Mail, pointing out that patients who had died from chronic or transmissible diseases were not acceptable donors.
Kyriakides said the government had suggested creating an organ donor register, but he said it would be more effective to sensitise the public to the importance of organ donation so that they were more willing to donate their loved one’s organs when the time came.
But Tornaritis believes that all Cypriots should automatically be added onto an organ donor register so that family consent is not needed.
“If there are people that do not want to donate their organs,” he said, “they will have to apply for exemption and be included on a special list of non-donors.”
Tornaritis said similar schemes already existed in France, Austria and Belgium and that their results were “encouraging”.
The deputy said his proposal would also combat the problem of transplant patients illegally buying organs on the black market in countries such as Romania, because there would be enough organs here.
“We need to be altruistic in practice, not just in words,” said Tornaritis.
“I know there are some ethical dilemmas attached to this proposal, but just think how proud parents of organ donors would feel knowing they had extended the life of another human being.”
He said that in Europe there were only 75 transplant patients per million people, but that in Cyprus there were nearly 150 patients in a population of 700,000.
“There is currently a very large transplant waiting list and a dwindling number of donors,” he said, “and something needs to be done about it”.
The vascular and transplant doctor, Kyriakides, confirmed that donors were always welcome and insisted the deceased’s body was not destroyed in any way because of the procedure.
“Doctors are not using it for an anatomy lesson. They merely remove the vital organ and give it to another human being so that he or she can have another chance at life.
“The dead person is then buried, and the family can grieve for them the way they would have, knowing that someone else is alive because of their generosity.”
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.
