'Organ donations ending up wasted'

MANILA, Philippines - Every year, there are donated organs that end up being wasted because the Filipino patients they should have been given to were either unable to afford the high cost of the operation or are not a match with the available organs, officials of the National Kidney and Transplant Institute said recently.

“We’re having difficulty getting kidney donations from deceased or brain-dead patients and then if they are not accepted by Filipinos, these organs only end up getting dumped,” Dr. Reynaldo Lesaca, chief of the NKTI’s Human Organ Preservation Effort, lamented.

In light of this, NKTI executive director Dr. Enrique Ona believes the government’s order banning foreigners from becoming recipients of organ donations in the country was a “knee-jerk reaction” to the problem of organ trafficking that should not have included those from deceased donors.

Ona and Lesaca said that while the number of deceased donors has increased recently, they have had to face hurdles in generating public awareness and acceptance for organ donations.

“The total ban was a knee-jerk reaction to an abuse that we’ve been trying to address,” Ona said during a press conference Friday marking National Kidney Month this coming June.

Issued in May last year, the ban replaced the earlier administrative order that had imposed a 10 percent cap on organ donations that could only be given to foreign nationals seeking treatment in the Philippines, Ona said.

Lesaca said that from 2000 to 2008, there were only 30 deceased kidney donors per year. But only for the second quarter of this year, there were already 30 kidney donors handled by the NKTI.

According to Lesaca, the ban should not have included donations coming from deceased patients, as incidents of coercion – that is the concern among donations from living donors that gave rise to the problem of organ trafficking – does not apply to families of deceased patients.

“We just have to make sure that when foreigners come here, they fall in line, just like all the other patients waiting for an organ donation,” Lesaca said.

Ona said that what authorities should do is to ensure a “leveling of the field” for all those seeking organ donation.

At present, he said there are two separate bills filed before both chambers of Congress to address the whole aspect of organ donation and transplantation in the Philippines. Ona is a member of a technical working group discussing the bills.

Lesaca said they expect the bills to drag on for a long time before they are passed and until then, they would have to abide by the present ban.