BAKU, Azerbaijan - More than 1,500 people in Azerbaijan are waiting for organ transplants, including over 50 patients seeking heart transplants, the head of the country’s organ-donation coordination center said.
Yegana Abbasova, chair of the Coordination Center for Organ Donation and Transplantation, announced the figures at a conference held during Heart Transplant Week, Vesti Baku reported.
Abbasova said 50 to 60 patients die each year while waiting for a donor liver. She added that the center had received notice a day earlier that two patients on the heart-transplant waiting list had died.
Posthumous Donor Registry
About 1,800 people have registered to donate their organs after death, Abbasova said. If brain death is declared for a registered donor, the organs may be transplanted to patients without additional consent from the donor’s relatives, she said.
Four Heart Transplants Completed
Professor Kamran Musayev, honorary chair of Azerbaijan’s Cardiovascular Surgery Society, said the country has performed four heart-transplant operations and that all four were technically successful.
Musayev said the next goal is to make heart transplantation a sustainable, regular program and expand access to more patients.
The coordination center previously proposed adding heart and cornea transplants to Azerbaijan’s mandatory health-insurance package. No decision on that proposal has been announced.
Sources: Vesti Baku; APA on the waiting list; APA on the transplant program.