Mexico Will Reinforce Organ Donation Culture

In Mexico, 75 percent of kidney transplants come from living donors. For this reason, the institutions compromising the national health system will reinforce organ donations from deceased persons, as they still are low, said José Salvador Aburto Morales, General Director of the National Transplants Center of Mexico.

Aburto Morales said that the goal is to reverse that percentage and reach a balance between living and dead donors: “In Mexico there is an important organs requirement for transplantation purposes, we have more than 20 thousand patients waiting for an organ; most of them (about 12,000) require a kidney transplant from a deceased donor.”

Three years ago our country had an organ donation rate of 3.2 per million people, and now stands at 4.03 per million. This figure is still low compared to other countries.

When a transplant is carried out in the country, the institution (public or private) must inform the Cenatra, providing the donor’s and the receiver’s information. In this way, the registrars are updated, and illegal practices are avoided.

According to Cenatra’s Director, “the general health law requires health facilities to meet certain requirements. One of these is to asking those people (donors and patients) to sign a document certifying the donation is free of trade or sale.”

“Those who donate must do it voluntarily, altruistically and there must not be a negotiation in the middle. It must go through an evaluation by the transplant committee, by the specialists and the psychological department of each hospital. However, this does not guarantee that there could not be an (illegal) case,” Aburto Morales added.

The Heroes for Life (Héroes por la Vida) program promotes the donation of organs and tissues for transplants in order to raise awareness and inform the population about the importance and transcendence of organ donation.

In addition, the Carlos Slim Foundation has a program to support the implementation of transplants, which operates through partnerships with the states’ governments, the national health institutes, hospitals and non-governmental organizations. From 2001 to 2015, 8,560 transplants have been supported.

 

Source: Notimex