About 90 percent of Chinese patients suffering renal diseases
cannot receive timely transplant operations due to the lack of
donated kidneys, according to statistics from the country's organ
transplant society.
The statistics showed that an average of 8,000 kidney
transplants are performed every year in China, which satisfies less
than 10 percent of the demands.
Due to the shortage of donated kidneys, most of the patients
have to rely on costly hemodialysis treatment to sustain their
lives, said Chen Jianghua, a professor with the Nephrology Center
of the First Affiliated Hospital of the Zhejiang University, east
China's Zhejiang Province.
A patient may only spend 40,000 yuan (US$ 5,000) on a kidney
transplant and other services when being hospitalized, but
hemodialysis will cost up to 70,000 yuan (US$ 8,750) to 100,000
yuan (US$ 12,500), Chen said. Chen's hospital alone receives about
70,000 patients with kidney problems each year and performs
hemodialysis for 40,000 times of them.
The renal disease has edged into the world's top five lethal
chronic diseases over the past decade. In China, it affects eight
to ten percent of people aged above 40.
China is now under a tight schedule to issue its regulations on
human organ transplants. Under the new regulations, a new
organization will be in charge of registering and allocating
donated organs, and evaluating the quality of the organ transplant
surgery.
Only the top-tier hospitals - usually located in provincial
capitals - will be allowed to perform organ transplants once they
have been approved by the Ministry of Health. It remains to be seen
whether exceptions will be made in emergency cases.
Currently, China has no clear laws on human organ transplants.
This has resulted in transplants being carried out by unqualified
doctors with substandard medical equipment, leading to the death of
some patients. It is also widely claimed that hospitals are
preoccupied with the quantity of organ transplants rather than the
quality.
The ministry's statistics indicate that China performed 34,726
organ transplants from 2000 to 2004, and at the end of 2004, 599
medical institutions did liver, kidney, heart and lung
transplants.
(Xinhua News Agency December 15, 2006)