TEHRAN — Organ donation in Iran set a record high in the first Iranian calendar month Farvardin (March 21-April 20) compared to the same period last year, an official with the Ministry of Health has said.

Last year (March 2018-March 2019) some 923 cases of organ donation were recorded in the country, Sanaz Dehqan said, however, she didn’t provide any exact figures about the number of organ donations reported in the first Iranian calendar month.

Dehqan went on to say that an automated database of organ transplantation has already launched in the country.

In mid-February head of the transplantation and treatment of diseases department at the Ministry of Health Mehdi Shadnoosh said that the first stage of establishing an automated database of organ transplantation would begin on March 1st. The second stage of this project will begin in May and the aim is for the whole system of organ donation to be automated in time, he added.

The database will include all the information about the people who are awaiting an organ donation; then the system will automatically rank them based on their needs and whenever a new organ is found the top ten on the waiting list will be introduced, he further explained.

According to the figures revealed by International Registry in Organ Donation and Transplantation (IRODaT) Spain leads the world in organ donation.

Figures published for 2017 reveal that 2,183 people in Spain became organ donors last year after they died. That’s 46.9 pmp – a standard way of measuring the rate of donation in a country, The Independent reported in July 2018.

Spain’s closest contender is Croatia, with 38.6 pmp (2016). It has maintained its position as the clear leader for the past 26 years. In a press release, Spain’s National Transplant Organization confidently describes the country as unbeatable.

According to the data published on IRODaT by the end of 2017 Iran’s per million population of actual deceased organ donors was 11.43. In 1996 Iran’s per million population of actual deceased organ donors was 0.1, which compared to the current per million people in the population (pmp) shows a great increase.

Some 5,000 people die of brain death annually in Iran, out of 3,000 brain deaths reported last year being qualified to be organ donors, only 926 donated their organs.

In May 2018, Masih Daneshvari hospital’s manager Ali Akbar Velayati said that some 10,000 people are waiting in transplant lists and every day some 10 people waiting for an organ lost their lives.

Omid Qobadi told IRNA in October 2018 that some 5 million Iranians hold organ donor cards.

MQ/MG