Organ Donation by Country

Saturday, June 5, 2010
DONATE LIFE ORGAN DONATION AWARENESS
Organ Donation by Country
By Serge Bedrebant
Financial Times, June 5, 2010

Doctors around the world are eager to increase the number of organ donations. One obvious strategy is to pass legislations that assumes that citizens are happy to donate organ unless they explicitly refuse. Austria, for example, has such and "opt out" system and in 2002, 99.98 percent of the population were potential organ donors. By contrast, Denmark has an "opt in" system, under which citizens have to volunteer, and in 2002 only 4.25 percent of the population had signed up. In 2008, Austria had a deceased organ transplant rate of 20.6 per million people (pmp), much higher than Denmark's, at 11.8 pmp.

An over all comparison of transplant rates, however, produces a more complicated picture. Like Austria, Poland has an opt-out system, but in 2008, a transplant rate of only 11.2 pmp. The United States has an opt-in system, and a rate of 26.3 pmp. So legislation helps, but does not decide everything. Rafael Matasanz, Director of the Spanish National Transplant Organizastion, argues that funding and regional organizations are, if anything, more important. Spain has a rate of 34.2 pmp, the highest in the world.

Sources: Science, 2003; Newsletter Transplant, 2009; “The potential impact of an opt-out system for organ donation in the UK”, Department of Health, 2008; Organ donor registers, 2006

See Graphic below for

http://donatelife-organdonation.blogspot.com/2010/06/donate-life-organ-donation-awareness_8833.html