Materia Medica Malaysiana

Jakim teams up with ministry to promote organ donation

MALACCA: The Department of Islamic Advancement (Jakim) has agreed to a request by a Health Ministry committee to get imam to talk on organ donation during Friday sermons.

Tan Sri Lee Lam Thye, who chairs the ministry's public education committee on organ donation, said Jakim had agreed in principle to this request after the panel sent a letter on the issue to the department in January.

He said the move would help increase the awareness of organ donation among Muslims.

Currently, Muslims make up just 8.9% of some 78,150 people who have pledged to donate their organs. Among the others, 66.3% were Chinese, 21.8% Indians and 2.9% others.

Jakim was drawing up the text of the planned sermon, which would be released to imam nationwide, Lee told reporters after launching an organ donation seminar at the Malacca-Manipal College here yesterday.

The committee would hold similar campaigns in rural areas, starting in Sepang, Selangor, in September.

A Jakim official from Putrajaya, Ustaz Asmawi Umar, said it was all right for non-Muslims to donate their organs to Muslims, and vice versa.

“There is no restriction on this,” he said.

A medical transplant co-ordinator, Dr Sahimi Sulaiman, cited the experience of Saudi Arabia in the field of organ transplants.

He said the Saudis started their programme in 1986 and over the next two years recorded 950 kidney donors, 165 heart donors and 163 liver donors.

Malaysia, which started organ transplants in 1976, only had 43 kidney donors and four heart donors up to 1988, he said.