By Zubeida Mustafa
Source: Dawn
LAST week, Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry directed the government to promulgate without delay the Transplantation of Human Organs and Tissues Ordinance 2007. In the absence of a law to regulate organ transplantation, unscrupulous elements have reduced Pakistan to what is dubbed as a ‘gurda kundi’ where humans are auctioned for their organs.
Continue reading The ordinance must be flawless
By Zubeida Mustafa
Source: Dawn
IT IS ironical that at a time when the Pakistan government has dismally failed to promote the tourist trade, some unethical transplant surgeons in Lahore and Islamabad have succeeded in firmly placing the country on the world map of ‘transplant tourism’.
This is not something to be proud of as it is bringing a bad name to the country and also its medical profession.
Continue reading And now transplant tourism
By Zubeida Mustafa
The story begins five thousand miles away in the Dutch city of Maastricht. In mid-January a 14-year old girl slips into a coma and dies due to a ruptured cerebral aneurysm. Her grief-stricken parents decide to gift her organs to the dying. Thus they would have the satisfaction of knowing that a part of their child has not died.
That is how the central registry of the Eurotransplant Foundation in Lieden gets an AB+ blood group donor.
It is noon in Karachi. At the Sindh Institute of Urology and Transplantation (SIUT) in the Civil Hospital there is a call for the director, Dr Adibul Hasan Rizvi, from Dr Ganke Kootstra of the University of Maastricht. There is a cadaveric kidney available. Does Karachi have an endstage renal failure patient who needs the organ and has the matching tissue type?
Thus begins the miracle for Shehnaz, a young woman of 24 and a resident of New Karachi. She has been haunted by the spectre of death for the last four months since her kidneys stopped working. She has survived with the help of dialysis — a procedure in which the function of cleansing the impurities in the blood is performed by a machine to which the patient’s artery is hooked. But life has been robbed of all joy. Since October Shehnaz has had to come to the Institute thrice a week for a four-hour dialysis session. Then too, she feels fit for only a day, after which the nausea returns. She also gets breathless. Continue reading At SIUT the dead help the living
By Zubeida Mustafa
Organ transplantation technology was introduced in the West in 1904 when the first corneal graft operation was performed in a New York hospital. The first kidney was transplanted in Boston in 1954. Today, surgeons in the Third World have adopted the technology with a growing measure of confidence and success. Nearly 40,000 transplantations are being performed every year all over the world and this technology has come to stay.
As happens in the case of any scientific breakthrough, many related issues, especially of an ethical nature, are now being debated. The 1 Institute of Urology and Transplantation, Civil Hospital Karachi, which has kept up a constant exchange of views and expertise with transplantation surgeons in Western centres, recently played host to two eminent gentlemen from the Royal Free Hospital, London. Dr Oswald Fernando, a surgeon from Sri Lanka, and Dr Zac Verghese, a basic scientist from India, have worked in Britain since 1963. They are therefore well placed to understand the challenges transplantation technology faces in the socio-economic conditions of the Third World. Continue reading Why not organs from cadavers?
By Zubeida Mustafa
Two hundred children in Britain who faced certain death from liver failure are alive today and leading a normal, healthy life. They owe their recovery to the miracle of transplantation: the technology that allows surgeons to graft wholesome organs from one person to another.
Behind every milestone in medical science there is invariably a human story of sustained commitment and caring effort. In the case of these 200 British children the man who has made liver transplantation possible is Sir Roy Calne, a pioneer in the field of transplantology. A professor of surgery in the Cambridge University and president of the. International Transplantation Society, Dr Calne has contributed to the science of transplantation by his research on the immuno-suppressive drugs, without which no organ graft can be successful.
The defence mechanism of the human body normally ensures that it rejects foreign objects, which include organs taken from another person. Hence the use of drugs to suppress the immune reactions but in such measured doses that infections do not kill the patient. Continue reading Gift of Life