Cheng said that a contributory factor to the shortage of donated organs in recent years had been the traffic regulations of 1997 that made the wearing of safety helmets compulsory for drivers of motorcycles and scooters.
"Since then, the incidence of head injuries has decreased by 40 to 50 percent," Cheng said.
But doctors say that one of the most important reason for the small number of willing organ donors is local social mores.
As the Chinese saying goes, "We dare not damage our body for it is given to us by our parents," people prefer to keep the remains of the dead intact out of respect.
Moreover, doctors say, even when a person has been declared brain-dead his or her family almost invariably refuses to allow life-support machinery to be turned off, preferring to wait another 10 to 20 days, for the brain cells and nerve cells to die, by which time the organs have been rendered unusable because of lack of oxygen.
Stringent provisions
Some legislators, doctors, and patients suffering from organ failure have blamed the stringent provisions of the Organ Donation Regulation (
This prevents spouses from donating organs to each other unless they have been married for more than three years or have produced offspring, and bans donations between relatives by marriage. Donors must be over 20 years of age and should be of at least the fifth-degree of kinship (cousins) to the recipient.
Cheng, however, says that lifting the regulations will not solve the problem of the shortage of organ donors.
Shiue Ruei-ping (
"In cases of living organ donation, people's attention is often focused on the suffering of the donee rather than on that of the donor. When striving to save a dying man, we often overlook the fact that we are actually putting another person's life at risk," said Shiue.
He added that the stringency of the regulations was aimed at guarding against the buying and selling of human organs.
Moreover, as Cheng stresses, "The fundamental problem of the shortage of donated organs is not caused by the stringency of the regulations but by the extremely low rate of deceased donors in Taiwan."
In order to increase rates of organ donation, the DOH, which established the OPA, is working towards promoting cadaver organ donation by asking people to indicate whether they consent to organ donation after death when registering for national health insurance.
The department is also preparing to establish an organ transplant registration center that would function similarly to the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) in the US.
The UNOS maintains a centralized national organ transplant waiting list and assures that all patients have a fair chance of receiving the organ they need.
"With Taiwan's advancements in organ transplant surgery, it is time for us to work on a more effective way to integrate data from major hospitals and to match organ donors with donees," said Shiue.
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