Durban - The decline in the number of life-saving donor organs available for transplanting into desperately sick patients in KwaZulu-Natal has become “a disaster”.
Jooste Vermeulen, the communications director for the Organ Donor Foundation, said this in Durban.
He added that KZN patients had longer to wait for transplants than those in other provinces - and most will run out of time and die before an organ becomes available.
“KwaZulu-Natal patients are desperate. The number of transplants performed in other provinces is dramatically more than in KZN and the divide is increasing every year,” he said.
Amazingly, he revealed that some hospital doctors, whose own patients have died, were failing to tell transplant co-ordinators that organs are potentially available to save someone else's life.
Vermeulen appealed to these doctors to “let go” of old perceptions and prejudices about transplantation to save KZN patients who were being unfairly affected by their attitude.
“If the opportunity to refer to a transplant co-ordinator is there, why don't they? All the facilities are here,” he said after the press briefing at Gateway Private Hospital in uMhlanga, where life-saving transplants are performed.
Vermeulen pointed out that the president of the South African Transplantation Society, Professor Jerome Loveland, had said after a recent visit to KZN that the practice of transplantation was ethical and morally healthy. Thus, “there should be no reason for prejudice or fear by any medical professional who is in a position to refer a potential organ donor to live up to the Hippocratic Oath (to save lives) they took”.
Transplant professionals were “tremendously frustrated” by the insurmountable odds of not getting the support from those medical professionals who could make a difference, he said.
More than a paradigm shift was necessary to “turn the tide” of the decreasing number of transplants in KZN.
There were 112 transplants carried out in KZN in 2002, but only 18 in 2014, he said.
This compared with 178 in Gauteng in 2002 and 163 in 2014, and 185 in the Western Cape in 2002 and 136 in 2014.
The number of people signing up on the national organ donor register had almost tripled in the past three years and there were now 43 396 people prepared to donate their organs if it came to it. Despite this growth, there was a nationwide decline in referrals, with the situation the worst in KZN.
Cindy Goldie, the transplant co-ordinator at Gateway Private Hospital, said that the Road Accident Fund (RAF) used to pay for accident victims (potential donors) to go to private hospitals, where transplant co-ordinators were able to consult staff on patients' end-of-life wishes. But after the RAF “went broke” these patients were now sent to state hospitals where staff did not call in co-ordinators.
Cardiothoracic surgeon and transplant specialist Robbie Kleinloog said there were 55 patients on the waiting list for heart and lung transplants and there were probably another 150 waiting somewhere - and that did not include patients waiting for kidneys and corneas.
If there was a regular transplant programme, with surgeons performing a transplant every month or six weeks, it would be possible to put in a mechanical heart to assist the patient's own heart.
Mechanical hearts only lasted a short time and currently cost between R1-million and R1.5m. Medical aids did not have the funds for that, but mechanical hearts would get cheaper over time and with a regular programme running, would tide patients over until they got a transplant.
Kleinloog appealed to people to speak to relatives about their wish to become organ donors. It would make it easier for them when they had to make a decision (they have to give consent).
And he stressed the importance of social media in getting the message out about organ donation. Young people ought to grow up with the idea that if something went wrong “they can't take their organs with them”, he said.
* One person can potentially save seven lives by donating one heart, one liver, one pancreas, two lungs and two kidneys.
The website address is: www.odf.org.za and the toll-free number: 0800 22 66 11.
Aged 34, but 21 at heart
Tina Beckbessinger might be 34-years-old, but her heart and lungs only turned 21 last year.
That is because she had a heart and double lung transplant almost four-and-a-half-years ago with the donor organs coming from a 17-year-old schoolgirl.
The unnamed teenager, who lived in another province, had told her parents just before having surgery that if things went wrong, she wanted to donate her organs.
“I think she must have been an amazing human being to be thinking of someone else at 17,” said Beckbessinger, who had been on the transplant waiting list for more than two years.
Born with narrowed arteries, three holes in her heart and a missing valve, Beckbessinger was fitted with a pacemaker at 13.
The new heart and lungs that she received from the unknown donor now enables her to lead a full life - and even take part in major cycle races on her tandem.
She is the sixth person in South Africa to have undergone a double lung and a heart transplant - and the only one to have survived.
* Another “amazing” person, according to Michael O'Donnell, 28, who is waiting for a kidney transplant, is his friend Sarel Zwarts, 31, who has offered to give him a kidney. Both Durban men were at Tuesday's Organ Donor Foundation briefing.
“When Sarel heard I needed a transplant, he said: 'Well buddy, here is my kidney: take it'.”
Daily News