Only 15 percent of Vietnamese interviewees said they would be willing to donate organs after they died, compared to a world average of 60 percent, while the country is in dire need of organs for transplant, local newspaper Vietnam News reported Thursday.
In a survey conducted by Vietnam's Health Ministry in Hanoi capital, central Da Nang city and southern Ho Chi Minh City, just 9.8 percent of interviewees were prepared to donate a part of their body while still alive, while 15.7 percent were willing to allow their family members to do so.
Nguyen Huu Thinh, director of Orbis, a non-governmental organization specializing in eye surgery, said the main reason people are afraid of donating organs while alive is fear of health consequences.
To date, Vietnam has successfully conducted 163 transplant operations, of which 158 were for kidneys, and the remainder involved in transplanting livers or bone marrow.
According to the ministry's statistics, some 9,000 local people are waiting for kidney transplant, 1,500 of whom live in Hanoi.
Besides the 158 local people having kidneys transplanted in Vietnam, over 300 have so far undergone their kidney transplants abroad, mostly in China where each operation costs 30,000 U.S. dollars, compared to 3,500 dollars in Vietnam.
Local patients are also in desperate need of cornea transplants, but because of few donors, corneas are in short supply. The Hanoi- based National Ophthalmology Hospital currently has 300,000 patients waiting for corneas.
Source: Xinhua
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