Doctors at 103 Military Hospital perform a lung transplant in 2017. Photo provided by the hospital’s doctors

HCM CITY — The law on donation, removal and transplantation of human tissues and organs and donation and recovery of cadavers should be amended to streamline procedures and help increase donations to save more lives, Deputy Minister of Health Nguyễn Trường Sơn has said.

Many provisions in it, such as the one on donors’ age, are barriers preventing tissue and organ donation, he said.

His ministry is drafting amendments and would submit them to the National Assembly next year, he said.

The amendments would be in compliance with the Declaration of Istanbul made at the 2008 Istanbul Summit on Organ Trafficking and Transplant Tourism to prevent transplant tourism, trafficking and commercialism and provide ethical guidelines for organ donation and transplantation.

The ministry held the conference to collect opinions on the amendments from health experts, he added.

Dr Trần Thị Cẩm Tú, deputy head of the Human Organ Transplantation Centre at Huế Central Hospital, said, “The amended law should allow people from 15 years of age instead of [the current] 18 to register for organ donation when they are brain dead.”

The Civil Code and Penal Code recognise people aged 15 as old enough for many things, she said.

But living donors should be more than 18 to donate an organ to a family member to reduce the impact on their health post-donation, she said.  

In the case of donations to strangers for transplantation, the donors should be at least 30 years old, she said.

She suggested setting up an online system to register for organ donation after brain death to get young prospective donors on board.

Prof Trần Đông A, a counsellor at Children’s Hospital 2, said the law bans organ harvest from brain dead children, reducing the survival chances of child patients who need organs.

Now doctors transplant kidneys taken from adults in children, a difficult task to perform, he said.

Nguyễn Hoàng Phúc of the Vietnam National Coordinating Center for Human Organ Transplantation said: “The number of people needing organ and tissue transplants is very high while the number of donors is low. Many patients die even as they wait for a donor.”

As of last year 40,257 people had registered to donate their organs and tissues in case of brain death, he said.

There are 100 living donors, while 339 have registered to donate their cadaver after death, he said. 

So far 5,587 people have benefited from organ transplants, he added.

According to the Ministry of Health, nearly 10,000 people are waiting for kidney transplants alone and thousands of others for other organs.

The conference also discussed the illegal buying and selling of human organs.

On March 9 the ministry had organised a conference in Hà Nội on funding for removal and transplantation of human tissues and organs. — VNS