Give kidney patients the right to save their lives!
According to the High Court, an estimated 20 million people in the country suffer from some form of kidney disease every year and about 35,000-45,000 of them die of kidney failure. Although the annual demand for kidney transplant is somewhere between 5,000-9,000, only about 120-130 end-stage renal failure patients can find healthy donors and undergo kidney transplant per year.
Among the thousands of patients hoping to receive a kidney transplant is the first blind lawyer of Faridpur Bar Association and a recipient of The Daily Star and IPDC Finance's Unsung Women Nation Builders Awards 2020, Marjia Rabbani Shoshi. Marjia has no eligible and willing donor in her immediate and extended family, which means her only option is a nonrelative donor or a cadaveric one. The latter is difficult because of the social taboo about removing organs from the body of a brain-dead patient, while the former cannot be done unless the Organ Transplantation Act 1999 is amended to allow voluntary kidney donations. Last December, the High Court even ordered the government to make such an amendment within six months. Unfortunately, the drafting of the amendment is still only at its primary stage, as this newspaper reported yesterday.
Because the law prohibits voluntary kidney donations, hundreds of Bangladeshis are forced to travel abroad in search of a life-saving kidney transplant. Others have to resort to middlemen and the black market, who convince the economically poor to become donors and take advantage of them, while charging the patients hefty sums of money.
The number of promising lives that are lost every year due to such roadblocks is staggering. And the fact that the government isn't moving quicker to remove them is unacceptable. People like Marjia should not have to wait around indefinitely for the government to slowly reframe the law. They should be able to get a procedure that could save their lives done immediately.
The government needs to urgently amend the Organ Transplantation Act 1999, as per the High Court's directive. It should also launch an awareness campaign so that it becomes more feasible for kidney patients to receive transplants from cadaveric donors.
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