Heart valve from a cadaver does not require any matching and can be transplanted to another person.
In his power point presentation, Dr H Sudarshan, member of the Authorisation Committee, Government of Karnataka, on Thursday, alleged that doctors and transplant surgeons are hand in glove with the touts, who arrange for heart valves from cadavers and sell them to cardiac centres. “They are involved in the illegal organ trade, kidney is most prominent among them,” he charged.
He was speaking on the ‘Ethics in Transplantation’ at the second national bioethics conference in the City, organised by the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics. The theme of the conference being ‘Moral and ethical imperatives of health care technologies’.
Dr Sudarshan said that the Authorisation Committee has recommended that all hospital should have ethics committees and should promote blood-related donors and cadaveric transplants. “They should verify the address of the donors and do a followup,” he stressed.
‘Technology has failed’
Earlier at the plenary session, Dr Padmini Swaminathan, director, Madras Institute of Development Studies, said that technology has failed to achieve its objective, of making healthcare accessible to all, because it is “far removed from the socio-economic context.”
She said health professionals must engage with the people to look at the socio-economic context of their illnesses. Dr Swaminathan laid stress on occupational health hazards. “More and more villages are getting industrialised and the health profile of people is changing. One must look into the reasons why work is leading to disease and misery,” she said.
Dr Vasantha Muthuswamy, deputy director at the Indian Council of Medical Research emphasised the need to have structures in place to regulate new technologies as they develop. The ICMR’s ethical guidelines for biomedical human research have recently been revised in response to advances in reproductive technologies and research.
In his inaugural address, Dr M S Valiathan, former director, Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute of Medical Sciences and Technology, Thiruvananthapuram, explained that bioethics is about “man’s relation to nature. The most profound changes are taking place in our bio-diversity; we are destroying our environment”, he added. He also mentioned that there’s a need to look into the ethics of traditional medicinal systems like Ayurveda.
In the second plenary session, Dr Arjun Rajagopalan of the Sundaram Medical Foundation in Chennai. said the annual executive health check-up promoted by hospitals is “industry-driven and bad science”. “The pressures to earn a living encourages unethical medical practice,” said Dr George Thomas of St Isabel’s Hospital, Chennai and editor of the IJME.
Giving the patient’s perspective, Vandana Gupta, a cancer survivor and founder of the cancer patients’ support organisation V-Care said that patients have a right to know — in advance — what treatment they are being given, its side effects and the costs.
She was recruited into a clinical trial without being informed of the possibility that she might be in the group that receives the placebo or ‘sugar pill.’
Around 600 delegates from India and 13 other countries are participating in the conference.
