A survey conducted by the Brazilian Government shows that the number of organ donors has reached record-breaking figures. The data was collected from the Brazilian Organ Transplant Association (ABTO) and shows that the country is experiencing the best donation scenario in 20 years.
In 2016, 25 thousand transplants were conducted, while in 2017 this figure reached 27 thousand. The figures shows that after a few years of downturn and small advances, the number of transplants is growing again.
In relation to the rate of effective donors – those who had organs transplanted to other people – up to 2017, this indicator grew for seven consecutive quarters – something not seen since 2009, when ABTO started publishing quarterly reports. As a result of this increase, in the last year’s final quarter, the country reached a rate of 16.6 effective donors per million people (pmp).
For the president of the Brazilian Alliance for Organ and Tissue Donation (Adote), Rafael Paim, a number of fac-tors have contributed to this improvement after years of living in a state of alert, with few donations.
According to Paim, one of the most important factors is the training of transplant teams. Among other activities, the training helped improve the way the possibility of donation was communicated to family members of the deceased.
Despite recent advances, work is far from over. At the end of last year, over 32.4 thousand adult patients were in the waiting list for an organ, in addition to another thousand children, who were also waiting for a transplant. Most of them (30 thousand adults and 785 children) were waiting for kidneys or corneas.
Source: BrazilGovNews