After an arduous struggle of over a decade by committed health professionals Pakistan now has an organ transplant law. President of PAKISTAN Asif Ali Zardari signed the Human Organ and Tissue Transplantation Bill 2010 which had been adopted by the two houses of parliament earlier.
The president also announced that he was willing his organs for transplantation. This law regulates organ donation and transplantation practices that were first introduced in the country nearly 25 years ago. Mostly poor people sale their kidne. the course of time the technology had come to be misused by some unscrupulous surgeons who were exploiting the poverty of naive people to satisfy their own avarice and bring the country a bad name.
It goes to the credit of all institutions that played a role in getting this law adopted that since the law was first introduced as an ordinance in 2007 the sale and transplantation of organs, especially in foreigners, have more or less been halted. The rare cases that still surface will be checked if the law is strictly enforced. It provides for a monitoring authority and an evaluation committee, as well as certification by the monitoring body of the hospitals permitted to transplant organs. As deterrence, imprisonment and fines have been prescribed for violators of the law.
To maximise the effectiveness of the law it is important that the focus should now shift to mobilising people to come forward to sign donor cards to become potential donors. The Sindh Institute of Urology and Transplantation has done well to take the first step at an event on Thursday titled ‘Ushering in the era of cadaveric organ donation’. Actually the era is already in progress. Recently the organs of a young man who died in Islamabad in an accident were used for transplantation. The SIUT has in the last year or so mobilised over 600 potential donors. More should come forward.
