Welcome
Letter From The Editor
In this issue we are pleased to bring you the exciting news that Dubai Healthcare City will launch a world-class tertiary care teaching hospital. This story has been developing for several months, as faculty from HMI, health care leaders in Dubai, a team of architects from a top firm, and clinical and administrative experts from throughout the Harvard medical community have worked together to design every component of the University Hospital.
Around Harvard
Wockhardt gears up to advance organ transplantation in India
Dr. Douglas Hanto
Dr. Douglas Hanto, head of the transplantation division at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, recently visited Wockhardt Hospitals Limited in Bangalore to provide expert advice as the growing health care network develops plans for organ transplantation programs.
Today organ donation in India is relatively immature. Most organs are from living donors who are related to the patient. No central national registry of those in need exists, and the infrastructure for organ retrieval, storage, and transport is scattershot at best. Hanto explained that the organ transplantation system in the United States was no better 25 years ago, but has advanced steadily.
“The organ transplant system in the U.S. is relatively mature. A very small percentage of organ transplants are actually from live, unrelated donors,” said Hanto. Data from 2006 bear this out. That year, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, nearly 29,000 transplants were performed in the U.S.—three quarters of them using organs from deceased donors. Of the more than 17,000 kidney transplants, only about a third used organs from live donors. Of the some 6,500 liver transplants, fewer than 300 depended on live donors. The numbers of kidney and liver transplants performed were both all-time highs.
Hanto said that in the U.S. a robust infrastructure for transplantation continues to evolve. There are 59 organizations that maintain a regional registry of donors, and the United Network of Organ Sharing (UNOS) maintains a country-wide database of potential donors. UNOS and the American Organ Procurement Organization work with and get the consent from families and coordinate the retrieval of organs from the respective hospitals. Also, the Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients supports the ongoing evaluation of the scientific and clinical status of solid organ transplantation in the U.S.
At the meetings in Bangalore, WHL Chief Executive Officer Vishal Bali called for a national agenda around organ donation, and said that the medical community must address the challenges of affordability and dispel myths about transplantation. “We need a structure or a system in place. Illegal organ donation exists only because of the lack of a proper system,” he said, adding that just as several organizations came together and made eye donation socially acceptable, the same could be done for donation of other organs, even critical organs.
More Featrured Stories
HMSDC fellowship brings Gulf scientist to BWH laboratory
Around HMI: Employee Award, NPR Coverage, and the new HMI Annual Report
