Harvesting a patient’s organs while he is alive raises all kinds of ethical questions and triggers multiple alarms. The issue is especially complex because biomedicine, and the very definition of death and even consciousness, are all in flux.
However, it has emerged that doctors will harvest kidneys from fresh corpses if legislators pass a proposed law, head of renal unit at KNH John Ngigi said yesterday.
Experts are critiquing the Kenya National Blood Transfusion and Organ Transplantation Bill before it is forwarded to Parliament.
“We also hope we can change the law to extract from friends, but we don’t want to open a Pandora’s box where people can buy kidneys. When the [proposed] bill is up we can harvest from dead people,” Dr Ngigi said.
Ngigi said the bill will operationalise the Health Act which allows Kenyans, either in a written will or oral statement, to donate their bodies or body parts upon death.
“It will set proper frameworks for the donation of cadaveric tissues,” he told the Star.
Ngigi spoke at Kenyatta National Hospital during a briefing on the ongoing donor-supported orthopaedic and kidney transplant project.
About 4,300 Kenyans are undergoing dialysis in 151 centres across the country, according to NHIF.
However, the challenge could be taken for an example our hypothetical patient, and the nature of the coma itself. A small number of patients emerge from comas after long periods of time, regaining full consciousness with many or most of their physical and mental functions intact. Far more never recover any degree of consciousness and eventually die.
Should Kenya support Kidney harvesting from fresh corpse?