KARACHI, Nov 30: Speakers at a symposium on Wednesday said that cadaver organ donation situation in the region could be improved by having a set of laws and elaborative incentive plan for the families of donors.

The symposium was held as part of a four-day Congress of the Asian Society of Transplantation, which got under way on Nov 29 at a hotel. The Sindh Institute of Urology and Transplantation is hosting the event.

About 350 foreign and 600 local delegates are taking part in panel discussions, debates, plenary lectures, and the symposium. During the scientific sessions, organ transplantation activities taking place all over the world was discussed.

A professor of medicine and a former president of the Iranian Society of Nephrology, Ahad J Ghos, talked about an Iranian model renal transplantation programme, which was adopted in 1988 and was government funded, compensated and regulated living-unrelated donor programme, and said that at present, Iran was the only country in the region without a renal transplantation waiting list.

In 1988, there were many end stage renal disease patients in Iran, who needed renal transplantation but had no living related donors, while a deceased donor organ transplant programme was also not yet established in the country. As such, a large number of patients had created a long renal transplant and were waiting to travel abroad for transplantation, he informed.

Referring to several ethical problems remaining in the model, he maintained that those could be eliminated by public education and further governmental funding for living-unrelated donor transplantation. The first renal transplantation was done in Iran in 1967.

Giving a presentation on cadaver organ donation in Asia, Mustafa S Al-Mousawi, Vice-President of Kuwait Transplan-tation Society said that cadaver organ donors could be increased in Asia with good system of laws and regulation and financial incentives for donor families.

Discussing laws and legislations, he said that these should be aimed at defining brain death, allowing cadaver donation, making referral of brain death compulsory, and establishing organ procurement organizations. Incentives should include donation to families, if poor, which would help them educate their children, enable paying the debt and start a business for family as well, he remarked.

Prof Kiil Park, an expert in organ transplantation from Korea, said the living unrelated donor’s kidney transplantation was an alternative way to increase the number of available donors.

In the whole, the experts maintained that ethics and safety of living organ transplantation, live organ donation should not be carried out without consent and ethical statement. The topics of the day included discussion on liver, kidney, heart, lungs, pancreas bowel transplantation, and infection.

Ahmad Abdurrahman Shokeir, a professor of urology from Egypt, said that despite the remarkable improvement in the results of renal transplantation during the last decade, peri-operative surgical and medical complications continued to contribute significantly to the morbidity and mortality of allograft recipients.

A professor of transplant surgery from Turkey, M Mehmet A Haberal, shared his experiences in the filed of liver transplantation in the country and said that 13 years after the first living-related transplantation, his team successfully achieved the first cadaver-organ liver transplantation in 1988.

Prof Carl G Groth from Sweden said that in view of the shortage of human organs, acquisition of organs from animals could also be tried in the future.

Dr Anant Kumar from India, Dr G Opelz from Heidelberg, Guido G Persjin of Euro Transplant foundation, Antoine G Barbari from Lebanon and R Naqvi also spoke.