Half of renal transplants carried out illegally in Pakistan, says expert

Of the 1,000 renal transplants performed annually in Pakistan, around 500 or 50 per cent kidney transplants are ‘unrelated’ and carried out illegally.

Prof Saeed Akhtar, transplant surgeon and the Pakistan Transplant Society (PTS) president, said this while speaking to The News on Sunday. He called for launching a deceased-donor transplant programme to save thousands of lives.

“Unrelated and illegally performed renal transplants are not only Haram [forbidden in Islam] but their outcome is also not very good as the strict criteria that should be followed for a renal transplant is not followed. The only solution to get rid of trade of organs is to launch a deceased-donor transplant program in Pakistan,” he said.

The PTS president maintained that Punjab was the hub of illegal renal transplants where such procedures were routinely being performed in Lahore and Rawalpindi, along with Islamabad. Thousands of people in the country were in need of renal as well as other transplants but due to the absence of a deceased-donor transplant programme, those people were forced to purchase organs from others, he said.

“Thousands of people are annually dying in Pakistan due to organ failure including that of kidneys, heart, liver, pancreas and other organs but a majority of people don’t donate their organs after death. In other Islamic countries, thousands of lives are being saved as people donate their organs after deaths,” he added.

Youth saved two lives

Recalling an incident when a 21-year old Pakistani student studying in Australia came back to Pakistan and met a fatal accident a couple of years back, Dr Akhtar said the youth had asked his parents to donate his kidneys to someone if he died and his parents allowed the transplant of his kidneys to two women, one in Islamabad and the other in Karachi at the Sindh Institute of Urology and Transplantation (SIUT).

“On the request of the parents of this young boy who was brain dead, we harvested his both kidneys and transplanted them to two ladies, one in Islamabad and the other in Karachi. We sent the kidney of the boy to Karachi through a commercial flight, where it was received by an SIUT team, which transplanted it to a woman whose blood and tissue matching was done and she got a functional kidney,” he explained.

The PTS president, who started transplant programmes at Islamabad’s Shifa International, PKLI in Lahore and PAF Hospital in Islamabad, said organs of a deceased person could save lives of 11 people. He added that the heart, kidneys, liver, corneas, pancreas, lungs, intestines and bones of a deceased person could be transplanted to save 11 lives.

He asserted that the deceased-organ donation was not only permitted in Islam but it was routinely being done in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Egypt, Iran, Indonesia, Malaysia and other Islamic countries as well as Non-Muslim countries where thousands of lives were being saved with the organs of people who died accidentally and had donated their organs in their lives.

He said that in Pakistan, not a single heart transplant had so far been performed because the people were not willing to donate their organs after death even though hundreds of people were facing heart failure and dying within weeks due to it.

“A few years back, the Armed Forces Institute of Cardiology (AFIC) in Rawalpindi had a list of around 150 patients who required heart transplants but all of them died later as nobody donated heart in Pakistan after death. There may be hundreds of young men and women dying due to heart failure in the absence of deceased-donor transplant program,” he said and urged the people to donate their organs after death.

He said people should come forward, sign consent forms and tell their families to allow removal of their organs in case of their accidental deaths so that their organs could be harvested and used for saving lives of people facing organ failure and living a miserable life.