Green channel for organ donations
Print Edition
CHINA has established a green channel for human organs to shorten the time it takes to get them to transplant patients and avoid unnecessary damage or waste.
According to a joint circular from, among others, the Health and Family Planning Commission, the Ministry of Public Security and the Ministry of Transport, a 24-hour emergency hotline will help coordinate the transit process.
Ambulances will be given the right of way, planes will be allowed to take off early after a faster boarding service and people transporting organs by train can buy tickets after boarding. The Red Cross will also provide assistance during transport.
“Usually we book flight tickets and go through boarding as ordinary passengers, without any priority,” Dr Wang Shuo, a kidney transplant surgeon from Shanghai’s Zhongshan Hospital, said yesterday. “I think a green channel will facilitate our work in donated organs transportation.”
Wang said a decision to transport organs was usually last-minute with little time to coordinate the process.
“The queues at airports and sometimes flight delays do reduce the time window for transplants,” Wang said. “For example, a kidney cannot be used after 24 hours, so the sooner the surgery the better. The endeavor to improve transport efficiency is definitely welcomed.”
The circular described the transport of human organs as a race between time and life, as many human organs become unusable or dysfunctional following transplant surgery if there are any delays.
Last October, a team from a hospital in Wuxi, Jiangsu Province, wasn’t allowed to board a China Southern Airlines flight at Guangzhou because traffic problems meant they arrived at the airport just 15 minutes before take-off. The team had to change their tickets and took a flight with Shenzhen Airlines some 90 minutes later.
With the lung they were carrying having then been in transit for more than nine hours, it was rapidly reaching its useful limit. Fortunately, Shenzhen Airlines set up a green channel after it learned they were carrying a human organ and boarding took just 15 minutes.
The donated organ would have gone to waste if there were no seat available on the later plane, Chen Jingyu, the hospital’s deputy director, said at the time.
Chen, who heads the world’s fifth-largest lung transplant center, told Xinhua news agency that only 60 of 300 lungs donated in the first half of 2015 in China had been successfully transplanted.
China has the most donated human organs in Asia and ranks third in the world, but still faces a serious shortage.
In 2015, 2,766 people donated a total of 7,785 major organs after death, exceeding the sum of that in 2014 and 2013.
One of the major sources of human organs in China used to be from executed prisoners but that had been banned from the beginning of last year.
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