Organ transplant oversight promised

A system overseeing the transplant of organs is to be established, a senior Chinese health official said on Sunday.

Wang Yu, the director of the Bureau of Medical Administration of National Health and Family Planning Commission (NHFPC), promised a sound monitoring and evaluation system for human-organ transplant and regular examinations on relevant hospitals and doctors will be conducted.

Under the system, according to Wang, illegal organ sales, the private allocations of organs or illegal transplanting executed prisoners' organs will be seriously cracked down upon.

Huang Jiefu, vice minister of the NHFPC, said that any hospital, doctor or other judicial institution's acts of privately obtaining, allocating or transplanting executed prisoners' organs will be regarded as illegal and authorities would conduct a severe punishment.

He said that organs donated by the executed prisoners should also be included into China's organ allocation system and automatically allocated to the needed patients. "We should cut off any underground allocations of executed prisoners' organs," said Huang.

The supervising system could reduce the illegal utilization of their organs and encourage public wills toward donation, He Xiaoshun, vice president of the No. 1 Hospital Affiliated with Sun Yat-sen University, told the Global Times.

Huang also emphasized that executed prisoners should be properly commemorated for voluntarily donating their organs after death.

About 300,000 patients suffer from organ failure each year in China, but only around 10,000 organ transplants are performed, according to the NHFPC. Up till August 14, there were a total of 2,107 people nationwide who volunteered to donate their organs.