Bill to outline transplant rules

Star: KUALA LUMPUR: Only gazetted hospitals will be allowed to perform human organ transplants under amendments to be made soon to the Human Tissue Act 1974.
The amendments will also provide for the term “brain death” to become a new definition for death.
And doctors performing the transplants will be required to be registered as transplant specialists, Health Minister Datuk Dr Chua Soi Lek said.
“Doctors who certify brain death should not participate in the harvesting or transplanting of tissues at the same time,” he said.
The ministry also wanted to prohibit the sale of human organs, he told reporters after launching the first National Transplant Registry Report 2004 at Hospital Selayang yesterday.
He said the amended Bill would be tabled in Parliament next year.
The transplant registry report contains data on seven types of transplants – blood and marrow, cornea, heart, liver, renal, heart valve and bone and tissue.
National Transplant procurement manager Dr Lela Yasmin Mansor said that currently the Act did not have a specific definition for death.
She said a patient would be proclaimed brain dead when the brain could not recover from severe head injuries and died.
“His doctor will then switch off his ventilator that has been keeping his heart pumping,” she said, adding that this had been the practice in Malaysia and many other countries.
On the number of donors in the country, Dr Chua said only 91,309 people had pledged to donate their organs since transplants were first carried out over 30 years ago.
He also said a committee of unrelated organ donors had been set up to counsel and educate donors about the consequences of donating their organs.
Dr Chua also said the ministry was trying to establish Regional Transplant Units in the northern and southern parts of the peninsula and Kuching and Kota Kinabalu.