KARACHI: Experts call for progress on liver transplant
By Our Staff Reporter
KARACHI, March 9: The lack of will to donate the liver is one of the main causes for slow progress in the area of transplantation. The was the main talking-point on the third day of the joint conference
of the College of Physicians and Surgeons Pakistan and the Bangladesh College of Physicians and Surgeons.
The sessions were held under the chairmanship of Prof Adibul Hassan Rizvi of the Sindh Institute of Urology and Transplantation and Prof Zahid Hossain of Bangladesh.
Dr Arshad said that the lack of the will to donate the liver is a major issue. Dr Nida Wahid of SIUT in her presentation said that 75 per cent of hepatitis patients resided in Asian countries. She said that in order to cope up with the increasing demand of liver transplant cases, about 55,000 donors were needed and the will to donate was turning out to be an impeding factor.
Other speakers declaring the state of liver transplant as pathetic stressed the need for the creation of much-needed conditions - starting from pre-operative to post-post operative care - which would go a long way towards helping patients.
They said that while pre-imaging examination was available both for the donor and the recipient, socioeconomic conditions were the limiting factors. Dr Saeed Akhtar from Islamabad said that with persistent efforts and improvement, it had been possible to attain almost 100 per cent success rate in graft survival.
Dr Manzoor Hussain of SIUT said that since 1986 they had successfully done 111 major transplant operations; 18 of which were of minor age group whereas 93 were teenagers.
The second day of the three-day medical conference started with the Burki Memorial Lecture which was named after the late Lt-Gen Wajid Ali Burki who was not only a federal minister for a long time but was also instrumental in the establishment of the CPSP and was its first president. The lecture was delivered by Dr Belgacem Sabri of WHO and the topic was new challenges in medical education.
The thrust of Dr Sabri's lecture was on development of balanced human resources for health standards in the context of prevailing set of environment and socioeconomic conditions. The speaker set out overall improvement, reduction in health inequalities, fair financing with simultaneous response to non- health areas as the initial health goals.
He said that governance, financing, services provision and resource development fell under the preview of health standard functions, and the assessment of performance is done by WHO on quantitative and qualitative output.
The speaker pointed out that political, economic, poverty, environmental, epidemiological, demographic, financing, cost escalation and globalization as the challenges which medical education in Pakistan is facing.
The other lecture was delivered by Prof Abdul Mobin Khan of Bangladesh. In another presentation WHO country representative Dr Khalif Bile Mahmud spoke on the polio eradication programme in Pakistan. He said that from 1998 to 2004 a total of 119 countries out of the 125 polioendemic countries have been declared polio free.
