Karnataka government is going to make reporting of brain dead cases to the Zonal Coordination Committee of Karantaka mandatory. All the medical centres having intensive care units will have to strictly follow this practice from now making a major change of approach to the organ transplantation procedure.

The effort according to the state government will help to save patients who are waiting for organ donation.

The three year-old ZCCK has around 480 patients waiting for cadaver transplant, of these 95 per cent are for kidney. Between 2007 till now it has completed 49 transplants from 19 donors including 34 kidney, 12 liver and three heart transplants.

Karnataka will be possibly the second state after Tamil Nadu in the country if the government order is finalized to compulsorily declare the brain dead cases. This will see the hospitals reporting to ZCCK about the brain deaths. Grief counsellors will approach the families with requests to donate organs of the dead patient. Efforts will be also be made by the government to insist on sensitizing the medical staff and have efficient approaches within the hospitals to ensure organ donation is easier. These include issuance of brain dead certification, counselling the family, speedy completion of legal formalities and harvesting organs and at times transporting the organs in time to reach the recipients. Currently, the process of brain dead certification is conducted by a panel of experts who include a neurologist and one doctor attending to the patient and is completed after two examinations, said GK Venketesh, director, Institute of Nephrology- Urology which is a government owned facility and a member of ZCCK.

"We are working towards the finalization of the government order which will only encourage cadaver transplant programme in the state which is suffering from a serious lack of awareness. There is a huge demand an supply gap of kidneys as there is an increasing number of cases awaiting renal transplants," said ZCCK officials.

The 12 year cadaver transplant programme in Bangalore began commenced its operations under the Foundation for Organ Retrieval and Transplant Education (FORTE). It has made possible the harvesting of 40 kidneys, two livers and one heart until April 2005.

However, it was FORTE's initiative paved the way for the formation of the ZCCK that was led by professor D Nagaraja, former director, NIMHANS to open up an zonal committee under the aegis of the state government's health and family welfare department.

On April 20, the Institute of Nephrology and Urology performed the first cadaver transplant in a government hospitals successfully. The cadaver renal transplant was conducted on a 43-year-old chronic kidney disease patient from Tumkur district after he received a kidney of a 45-year-old who was brain dead patient at Manipal Hospital and this surgery operation was performed under Karnataka government's 'Kidney Suraksha Yojana' Scheme. The brain dead donor gave a new lease of life to six patients offering her corneas, heart valves, liver and kidneys.

Bangalore's National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences' which houses India's first and only National Brain Bank Centre (NBBC) has collected brains from dead patients suffering from neurological disorders, psychiatric illness, epilepsy, dementia and neuroinfections like HIV, Rabies, Herpes Encephalitis, Tuberculosis, Meningitis, etc. after post mortem and with the informed consent of the close relatives. Extensive research is on to identify enzymes present in the brain giving a direction to pharmacological drug development and drug modulation, said Dr SK Shankar, professor and head department of Neuropathology, NIMHANS and head, National Brain Bank Centre.