Organ donation in China: the major progress and the continuing problem

© 2016 by the Journal of Biomedical Research. All rights reserved. doi: 10.7555/JBR.30.20150160 China has banned harvesting organs from executed prisoners since January 1st, 2015[1], making voluntary donation the only legitimate venue for organ transplant. It is a critical move to settle all the controversies about China's organ transplant process by making a loud and strong statement worldwide that the Chinese government respects human rights and is streamlining its organ transplant process to conform with internationally accepted standards on organ transplantation. This regulation removes one major obstacle of organ transplant in China; however, China still faces the other major obstacle of critical organ shortage. China has built the organ donation system since 2010[2], and the number of organ donors and organs transplanted has been increasing steadily and rapidly in the past six years according to the data from the China Organ Donation Administrative Center (Fig. 1). Until November 23rd, 2015, there have been 4933 cases of successful voluntary deceased organ donation in total. However, it is still far from meeting the demand of organ transplants by patients. According to the statistics, the deceased organ donation rate in China currently is only about 0.6/1,000,000 China citizens, one of the lowest in the world[3]. The sad truth is that there are about 1 to 1.5 million people in China needing organ transplant every year and only 10,000 people can get a new organ successfully. It is time that we should figure out the exact reasons that hold Chinese people back from organ donation. With the development of economy and society, the traditional cultures and beliefs are no longer the dominant impedance to the public's willingness to donate[4]. A recent survey on organ donation among the healthcare professionals in 8 hospitals in Dalian and Chaozhou between October 2013 and January 2014 found that only 19.6% of the participants knew where to donate organs and only 13.7% knew the procedure of organ donation, indicating a severe lack of basic knowledge about organ donation even among those who work in hospitals[5]. Therefore, people not understanding and harboring concerns over organ donation are one of the key factors.