Transplant doctors call for more organ donations

Swiss doctors on Friday called for more people to donate organs, saying the waiting list for patients needing transplants is growing longer by the day.

Swiss doctors on Friday called for more people to donate organs, saying the waiting list for patients needing transplants is growing longer by the day.

The Swisstransplant organisation, which brings together six hospitals carrying out the operations, told a news conference in Berne that 920 patients were waiting for an organ in 1998.

Over the same period, the hospitals in Basel, Berne, Geneva, Lausanne, St. Gallen and Zurich had carried out 421 transplant operations.

The waiting list is getting longer as the number of donors is stagnating, according to Swisstransplant.

Doctors said their statistics showed that 15 out of 1 million people in Switzerland were willing to donate an organ — a fact which put the country well behind most other European nations.

The lead country is Spain with 31 people, while Britain is at the bottom of the list with 13.

People in Switzerland can donate organs up to the age of 70, provided they are healthy.

Swisstransplant hospitals have carried out 4,171 transplants. About 75 percent of those were kidney transplants and the rest were lung, liver and heart operations.