Doctors issue call for more organ donations

Medical experts have called for greater awareness of organ donation ahead of National Organ Donation Day, which falls on Thursday this year.

Presently, only one in 30 patients awaiting a transplant operation in China can receive a donated organ even though the accumulated number of donated organs and organ transplant operations in the country had reached the world's second largest two years ago.

Experts said the rate of organ donation in the country has exceeded 4 per million people following a continuous rise that started in 2015, and the acceptance of organ donation in big cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen has improved significantly. However, the rate is still a far cry from those in other nations.

"We can still see a huge gap with developed countries, where the rate is mostly between 20 to 30, and can be as high as 40 in some nations, such as Spain," said Song Kang, director of the organ procurement office at Zhongshan Hospital Affiliated with Fudan University in Shanghai.

Experts said that while China's organ transplant techniques are of an international level, the number of donated organs in the country is a bottleneck that restricts the further development of this domain.

Last month, a combined heart-liver transplantation was successfully performed at the Shanghai hospital. Only six such surgeries were reported in Asia.

Xu Yubao, who was among the first patients in China to undergo a donated liver transplant in 2001, said he and fellow recipients of such transplants are planning to publish a book next year to recount their stories before and after these life-changing surgeries as a way of giving back to organ donors and the society.