Taiwan to relax rules on human organ donation

Taiwan to relax rules on human organ donation

Posted : Sun, 28 Dec 2008 07:33:07 GMT
Author : DPA

Taiwan plans to relax rules on human organ donation to allow blood relatives to receive them, a move that is expected to ease the shortage of donor organs, a newspaper said on Sunday. Starting January 1, Taiwan will lift the ban on transplant between relatives, to motivate people to donate their organs upon death, the Liberty Times quoted Shih Chung-liang, head of Bureau of Medical Affairs at the Department of Health, as saying.

Under the new rule, blood relations have the priority of using a deceased person's organs for transplant, if the deceased person has signed the donation card or expressed the wish to make the donation before death, he said.

The deceased person's spouse can also also enjoy the same priority, the paper said.

However, while one organ of the deceased person can go to blood relations, the other organs must be donated - through the Taiwan Organ Registry and Sharing Centre - to other people waiting for transplants, Shih said.

Under the Human Organ Transplant Bill enacted in 1987, a deceased person's organs can only be donated to people on the waiting list.

The only exception is that a living person can donate part of his or her liver to blood relations or spouse.

Many Taiwanese do not want to donate their organs after they are dead due to the traditional Chinese belief that a body must be buried whole so that the soul can go to heaven.

Currently 6,076 Taiwanese are waiting for transplants, but only 191 people's organs were donated after their deaths in 2008.

The rate of organ donation in Taiwan is 7.2 organ donors per one million population, compared to 20 donors per million population in the United States and Europe, the Liberty Times said.

The shortage of donors has caused many Taiwanese to go to China to receive illegal transplants.

Every year, hundreds of Taiwanese fly to the mainland to receive organ transplants in hospitals in Guangzhou, Nanjing and Tianjin, which sometimes harvest organs from executed prisoners.

In 2005, Taiwan editor Lin Xiao-chun wrote a book called Change Liver Tale (Huan Gan Ji), relating how she took her husband to China for a liver transplant and explained how to plan the trip and how to tip the chief surgeon.

-- http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/247994,taiwan-to-relax-rules-on-human-organ-donation.html