"Every day I was racing with time. I did not know whether death or a new liver would come to me first," explained Liu Ning (pseudonym), 48, who just had a liver transplant after waiting for over one year.
Liu told the Global Times that when his doctor said that he could survive only if he was lucky enough to get a suitable liver, he was full of hope. However, after one month passed by, then half a year, he began to feel anxious and thought that his life was over.
"Hope is a terrible thing as it makes you endure endless waiting. I was tired of asking doctors whether I could get a new liver and was ready to quit," said Liu.
Liu, now recovering, felt he was the luckiest man in the world as he had seen many other patients die before getting a new organ.
According to savelife.org.cn, an organ donation registration platform under the National Health and Family Planning Commission (NHFPC), about 110,000 Chinese citizens have registered themselves as organ donors as of Monday. However, in the U.S., 120 million have registered, media reported.
Experts have pointed out that although the number of donors is rising, the country's huge shortage of organs will continue as traditional attitudes persist in China, and many donors cannot pass strict health requirements and the number of hospitals conducting transplants is still small.
More donators
The Chinese government started to pilot changes to the organ donation system in 2010, and criminalized the unauthorized trading of organs in 2011. Some 16 people, mostly medical workers, were jailed by a court in East China's Shandong Province Friday for two to five years for trading kidneys. In 2015, Huang Jiefu,a former Chinese vice minister of health, announced a ban on harvesting prisoners' organs, the Xinhua News Agency reported.
Two weeks ago, Alipay, a third-party payment platform under Alibaba, launched an online registration service for donations in cooperation with the China Organ Transplantation Development Foundation (COTDF). The platform attracted 117,685 registrations as of Monday.
Zhu Jiye, director of the Organ Transplantation Center of Peking University, told the Global Times that previously people were not willing to donate their organs due to taboos. Traditionally, many Chinese people have wanted to be buried "whole" as a mark of respect to their ancestors. However, as the transparency of the organ donation process has grown, more people, especially the younger generation, have become organ donors.
A survey conducted by COTDF in 2016 showed that 83 percent of respondents said that they were willing to become organ donors while 56 percent said that they have not registered because the process is confusing.
However, Zhu pointed out that increasing numbers of organ donors cannot solve the problem as the country has strict standards on organs; in addition, the number of hospitals that are qualified to carry out transplants is still very few due to a lack of trained surgeons.
Huang, current head of the National Human Organ Donation and Transplant Committee, has told media that organ transplants are performed in only 169 hospitals.
Weak consciousness
NHFPC statistics show that China processed 2,950 organ donations in the first nine months of 2016, up 50 percent year on year.
However, transplant surgeons noted that many donated organs come from the efforts of donation coordinators, whose job is to convince relatives of potential donors and help with the entire process of donation.
"Organ donation needs wider dissemination as in most cases, it relies on coordinators, who find possible organ sources and persuade them and their families to donate," said Zhu.
Zhu pointed out that many hospitals are not aware of the need to identify potential donors and report them to qualified hospitals.
Chen Jingyu, deputy head of Wuxi People's Hospital in East China's Jiangsu Province, told the Global Times previously that many donated organs ultimately go to waste due to poor storage.
The Civil Aviation Administration of China issued a notice on February 25 to make it easier to transport organs, saying airlines should train staff to give priority to doctors transporting organs, news site thepaper.cn reported.
