Voluntary donations rapidly increase to over 14,000 in 2014

A former senior health official said that demand for organ transplants in China is twice as much as the supply rather than 1:150, a rate that has been widely reported in the past years.

Currently, around 22,000 patients are on the organ transplant waiting list, and 937 major organs were donated from January to March 4 this year, according to Huang Jiefu, former vice-minister of health.

"We can perform 10,000 to 12,000 organ transplant operations in 2015, which puts the ratio of transplant surgeries every year and people on the waiting list to 1:2 rather than 1:150," Huang told the Guangdong-based New Express Daily during the ongoing two sessions. [Special coverage]

Media outlets have widely quoted data issued by the Ministry of Health in 2012 that about 1.5 million people in China need organ transplants.

However, only around 300,000 out of the 1.5 million patients are in real need of a transplant, because some of them are not suitable for surgery, such as liver cancer patients, Huang said.

"Many kidney disease patients can live for years relying on dialysis, and some liver cancer patients can live by cutting parts of their liver," Zhu Jiye, director of the Organ Transplantation Center of Peking University, told the Global Times.

Among the 300,000 patients, many would drop the transplant option as they cannot afford it. A major organ transplant costs around 300,000 yuan ($47,970) to 500,000 yuan, and post-operation treatment requires another 5,000 yuan every month. "These are astronomical figures for many ordinary families," Huang said.

Both Huang and Zhu believe that the insufficient medical service capacity affects the number of organ transplants doctors can perform annually.

Only several hundred doctors in China's 169 hospitals are able to perform the surgeries; thus, China can only perform around 10,000 organ transplant operations every year, Huang said.

"But the biggest problem remains the lack of organ donations," Zhu said.

"Many medical professionals are unaware of their responsibility in informing patients' families of the organ donation procedure, which results in the loss of possible donors," Zhu said.

The country witnessed an increase in the number of the organ donations since it set up a pilot project in 2010.

Only 88 organs were donated in 2010, but the number rose to 4,681 in 2014. The number of people who volunteered to donate organs also rose from 1,087 in 2010 to 14,636 to 2014, according to statistics sent to the Global Times by the China Organ Donation Administrative Center under the Red Cross Society of China.

China formally abolished harvesting organs from executed prisoners for organ transplants in 2015 and launched a voluntary donation system. About 60 percent of the transplanted organs were from those condemned prisoners every year.