Leaders pledge to donate to end reliance on organs of executed prisoners

A number of high-level officials have offered to donate their organs after death to help push forward a pledge to end harvesting the organs of executed prisoners, Vice Health Minister Huang Jiefu said Wednesday in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, the Nanfang Daily reported.

"Conservatively, it's estimated that within two years, sourcing organs from executed prisoners will end," Huang was quoted as saying, adding that with fewer criminals being executed, the country cannot rely on them to provide needed transplant organs.

In March, Huang was quoted by the Xinhua News Agency as saying that the use of condemned prisoners' organs would come to an end.

Huang told the newspaper that the number of people waiting for donated organs has been overestimated.

"The country now needs 200,000 to 300,000 organs for transplant, lower than the previous estimate of somewhere between 1 million and 1.5 million," Huang said, adding that the 10,000 transplant surgeries conducted annually in China still fall far below the demand.

"It's doubtful that donations from citizens can replace organs from criminals in the near future," said Liu Changqiu, an associate researcher with the Institute of Law at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, who has conducted extensive research on organ transplants.

The county has set up a trial system of allocating and sharing privately-donated organs among some regions, and plans to expand it nationwide next March.

From the time the trial system was launched in 2010 up to last month, 1,466 human organ donation cases had been handled by 38 authorized hospitals in the country, in which 1,256 major organs were involved.

"I signed the donation paper in the 1990s and the majority of the 140 senior military officers, officials and intellectuals in my choir have expressed their willingness to donate too," Huang was quoted as saying.

Zhao Baige, executive vice president of the Red Cross Society of China, said a human organ donation foundation is also to be set up to promote donations by rewarding and subsidizing donors and their family members.