By Caroline Song

The Hindu, an independent editorial, recently published an article that indicates that cadaveric donations could help alleviate the gap between organ supply and demand. The Hindu correspondent M. Vandhana spoke with Dr. Christopher Barry, a liver transplant surgeon who is currently working with the Multi Organ Harvesting Aid Network (MOHAN). According to Dr. Barry, around 90% of organ donations in India come from living donors. Recently, however, in Tamil Nadu, a new organ transplant network was introduced that proved to be ten times more effective than any of the other systems in India. The only difference was that it included deceased donations.

Currently, “[o]nly 0.08% of the entire population comes forward to donate organs. This is an issue that needs to be addressed,” said S. Kavitha, the organ transplant coordinator of the MOHAN Foundation. Methods like those used in Tamil Nadu could be used to increase the donor pool through cadaveric donations and work to alleviate the organ shortage in India.

Read the full article here.