THE Human Organ and Tissue Transplant Bill which was presented to the National Assembly on Thursday last will be of benefit to hundreds of Guyanese who suffer from kidney failure and are currently on dialysis.

“This legislation is very significant for the entire country in terms of everyone who has kidney failure,” Dr Kishore Persaud, Head of Department, Multi-Organ Transplant and Vascular Access Surgery at the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation (GPHC) told the Sunday Chronicle.

“We have hundreds of patients who are on dialysis who are suffering because they have to do dialysis regularly. It’s one of the most expensive treatments and the morality and mobility of being on dialysis is so severe, they cannot afford it, they live a poor quality of life,” he explained.

If passed in the National Assembly, the Human Tissue Transplant legislation will provide the regulatory framework which will enable Guyana to perform cadaveric transplantation; this is the transplant of tissue from ‘brain dead’ individuals, or cadavers as they are referred to, to living persons.

“What this legislation is going to do, it’s going to allow people who are willing to donate kidney after they die, allow us under safe guidelines to transplant it into these patients so they can actually live a normal and healthy live afterwards,” Dr Persaud said.

Implementation of the new legislation will mean that persons in need of organ donations would no longer be at the mercy of just relatives and friends who may or may not be matched, as they would also stand the chance of being saved by organs extracted from a ‘brain-dead’ patient.

The Bill caters for establishment of the Human Organ and Tissue Transplant Agency as the national regulatory body for the donation and transplantation, as well as a National Donor and Transplant Registry, which will handle all matters relating to the consent.

The registry will be responsible for the establishment of a register of patients in need of transplants, as well as the establishment of efficient storage facilities for organs, cells and biofluids.

It also provides mechanisms to protect against human-organ trafficking; it prohibits the sale and/or trade of human organs, tissues, cells or biofluids for valuable consideration, specifying jail time of five years as well as a fine of $5 million, and stipulates that removal of organs shall not be done unless the donor is pronounced dead by two medical practitioners.

Added to that, the proposed law empowers the Minister of Health to name any hospital, including a private hospital, clinic, healthcare provider or laboratory as designate facilities approved to function as transplant facilities.

Once enacted, the Human Organ and Tissue Transplant law is expected to result in many lives being saved, especially considering the growing number of persons in Guyana awaiting organ transplants; more prominently, patients suffering from kidney failure who rely largely on dialysis as a life-saving mechanism.

“It’s [the legislation] going to help the citizens of this country who are suffering on a daily basis, this has no benefit to me or my unit, it’s more work for us, this legislation is going to help the people of this country,” Dr Persaud said.