The shortage of organs donors is a real problem, not only in Malaysia, but worldwide. Learn more about this issue at a public talk, which will be held on May 4 (next Sunday) in Kuala Lumpur.
IN Malaysia, we are now seeing approximately 100 new cases per million population of patients with kidney failure requiring dialysis, which amounts to almost 3,000 new cases per year.
Whilst dialysis services have increased to cope with this increased demand, kidney transplantation, which is the most effective treatment for patients with kidney failure, have unfortunately lagged far behind.
In Malaysia, our transplantation rate remains at one of the lowest in the world, at slightly less than one transplant per million population.
The rate of transplantation over the past few years have fallen drastically partly due to fewer numbers of live-related donors, but particularly due to substantially reduced number of cadaveric kidney transplants.
This has unfortunately taken place despite the large numbers of potential donors given our high road traffic accident rate.
Whilst support from the public has been good, there clearly is substantial room for improvement. Without public support and referrals by clinicians looking after these unfortunate patients, our transplant programme will not progress and our patients will continue to be denied what is essentially the preferred choice of treatment.
It is therefore important that we improve on our transplant programme and have a transplant service that we can be proud of and that is comparable with the best in the world.
With this Public Forum, we hope to have your support in achieving this objective, and with the progress made, we hope to be able to expand our services further by moving into simultaneous pancreas kidney (SPK) transplantation, a service which is not yet available in South-East Asia.
The need for simultaneous pancreas kidney transplantation is clearly obvious especially when statistics show that diabetes is by far the most common cause of kidney failure.
The public talk will be held on May 4, from 11am to 2pm, at the Universiti Malaya Medical Centre, Sekapur Sireh Hall, First Floor, Bangunan Kecemasan, Kuala Lumpur. Lunch is provided.
There will be several prominent speakers at the public talk. They include Prof Sir Roy Calne, Prof SY Tan, Prof Vathsala Anantharaman, Dr Visist Dhitava, Prof Krishnakumar, Prof Vickneswaran and Dr HS Lee.
In particular, Sir Roy is an eminent transplant surgeon who was knighted in 1986 for his services to solid organ transplantation. He has received many awards, including a nomination for the Noble Prize in Medicine.
Over the past nine years, he has been Visiting Surgeon and more recently Visiting Professor at the University of Malaya where he contributes regularly to University of Malaya Medical Centre (UMMC) transplant programme.
This article was originally published in theStar Online.
 Click here to return to previous section
|
