Steep drop in organ donations 11 January 2006 By KAMALA HAYMAN
The number of New Zealanders who donated their organs after death fell to 29 last year – the fewest in more than a decade.
Major strides in medicine and fewer road accidents have meant a drop in the number of potential donors, and a leading specialist has warned the decline is likely to continue. The Australia and New Zealand Organ Donor Registry yesterday released figures showing the number of deceased donors fell by more than a quarter from 40 in 2004 to 29 last year. The previous lowest figure was 34 in 1993 – the first year national figures were collected. Australia saw a 7 per cent fall in organ donors last year. New Zealand's 29 donors helped more than 100 patients, including 51 who received kidneys, 23 who got livers, 16 for hearts, 11 for lungs and two who were given a new pancreas. New Zealand has one of the lowest rates of organ donation in the Western world at less than 10 deceased donors per million population. Last year's rate was seven. Organ Donation New Zealand clinical director and Auckland City Hospital intensive care specialist Stephen Streat said deceased donor numbers around the world would continue to "trickle down". It was "a temporary technology" unlikely to survive into the next century, he said. "It's rather crude ... we try to wedge a square peg into a round hole." Such transplants were likely to be replaced by better and cheaper artificial organs or by organs grown from a patient's own stem cells. "This is in its infancy but it looks promising," said Streat. It had the potential to "truly be a cure" without the need to suppress a recipient's immune system for life. Currently, organ donors were intensive-care patients who suffered brain death. Typically, they died from a major head injury, often due to a road accident, or from a brain bleed caused by a burst aneurysm (a balloon-like swelling in an artery). But Streat said road deaths had halved since 1989 and significant improvements in neurosurgery allowed aneurysms to be treated more quickly and without major surgery. Two decades ago, 85% of those suffering a burst aneurysm in the brain died. Today, two-thirds survived. Last year was possibly the first when a new technique to block off an aneurysm from within the artery, avoiding an operation to open the skull, was used in Christchurch, Wellington and Auckland. Streat said about 60% of families agreed to organ donation when asked, similar to international rates. In New Zealand, some suitable families may not have been asked about organ donation either because of "extreme distress or violence", or because intensive-care staff lacked the expertise. Streat said this only happened "very occasionally". Organ Donation New Zealand manager Janice Langlands said the organisation's budget was tripled last year to about $750,000 and some of this was spent on workshops for intensive-care staff on approaching families about organ donation. She said doctors would not use a patient's organs without the family's consent. "You just wouldn't do that to a family at that time. All of them are sudden, unexpected deaths of loved family members." An audit released in 2002 found that of 104 patients who could have been organ donors, just 38 were. Of the remaining patients, 31 families refused consent and another 35 families were not asked.
Courtesy of STUFF - www.stuff.co.nz
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