The two-year-old Zonal Coordination Committee-Karnataka, a state government monitoring cell for implementation of the Transplantation of Human Organs Act 1994 with special emphasis on cadaver organ donation now calls for private hospital participation in cadaver donation as part of their agenda.

This is on account of the fact that in the last 24 months, there has been not a single recipient for the cadaver organ donation programme. Now the Committee plans to involve the private hospitals whose transplantation activity is monitored by the Karnataka Appropriate Authority and the Authorization Committee for kidney transplants which oversees state of organ donation and issue licenses to transplant centres.

Since its formation in April 2005, Zonal Coordination Committee-Karnataka received around 10 kidney transplant cases registrations. There were only three organ donations and all of them were brain dead cases and whose families consented to donate their organs to needy patients. But these organs were unfit for harvesting as the recipients blood group did not match the cases.

According Prof. D Nagaraja, chairman, Zonal Coordination Committee-Karnataka and director, National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences (NIMHANS), the scene for organ transplant and donation is not an encouraging one.

Factors contributing to poor response are that the concept of cadaver transplantations is embedded with serious restrictions. Every single brain dead victim is not an ideal source for organs like liver, kidney and heart.

In Karnataka, it is only NIMHANS which receives the maximum number of accident cases and the Institute does not encourage or advice the relatives to donate organs. Not only accident cases are usually inflicted with multiple injuries which makes organ harvesting impractical.

Also, Bangalore also does not have ample number of intensive care and trauma care centres and this makes the whole process of cadaver donation impossible. The most frequented emergency care centre in the city is NIMHANS. Although many of the cases are fatal NIMHANS is not able to encourage organ donation. In his capacity as chairman of Zonal Coordination Committee-Karnataka of cadaver transplants, Prof. Nagaraja has now approached Sanjay Gandhi Accident Relief Hospital and Research Centre which is located behind NIMHANS to set up an exclusive trauma centre along with hospitals like Victoria an Bowring and Lady Curzon Hospitals to take on the onus of accident cases and also allow to identify fatal cases for organ transplant.

Adding to the woes of trauma units in the State is the acute shortage of ventilators and life support systems which are critical to keep prospective donors alive until the organs could be harvested. In spite of a seamless network maintained between private hospital in the city during an accident emergency, yet the pace cadaver transplant programme has been slow, pointed out, healthcare majors.

Until the Committee came into being, it was an NGO- Foundation for Organ and Retrieval and Transplant Education (FORTE) which was facilitating a cadaver organ transplant in the state. This allowed private hospitals to carry out nearly 40 transplants of kidneys and a couple of liver transplants. Many a time organs are flown to Delhi and Hyderabad when suitable patients were not found in Bangalore, informed Kishore D Phadke, managing trustee, FOTRE and member of the Zonal Coordination Committee-Karnataka.