TIJUANA Some 600 people are on Baja California's registry waiting for an organ to save their lives, according health authorities. Some, particularly those needing a kidney, have been waiting up to three years.
The odds are against them, however, given the relatively few organ donations made in the state and a process that everyone agrees needs improvement.
The number of people who need a kidney transplant is much greater. Support groups estimate that some 2,000 people are receiving dialysis in the state's public and private institutions, and many of them would be good candidates for a transplant.
Patients in need of a transplant are told that there are no donors or to find one themselves. The latter is a tall order given that in Mexico donating organs is not common and there's very little awareness of the need for it.
However, health authorities at the federal and state levels have been working to increase the number of donations and to make the process of getting organs to needy patients more efficient.
In December, Mexico's Congress approved a reform in the General Health Law that says that every person who dies tacitly agrees to donate his or her organs except for those who explicitly express otherwise.
In Baja California, the Attorney General's Office, the Association of Public Notaries and the health sector recently signed accords to speed up the legal process for people to donate an organ or for families of people who die to do so.
Javier Ibáñez, the president of the association that represents notaries in the state, said members agreed to process the documents free of change for any person who agrees to donate an organ.
However, patients needing a transplant face major hurdles. There is not enough coordination among health institutions and support groups to organize a permanent campaign to seek organ donors. And that's not even considering patients who lack medical insurance to cover the costs of a transplant.
"The lack of a culture of donating organs is a severe problem. Society needs to participate fully," said Alejandro Vizcarra, president of an association he founded called Tiromet, which represents 120 people who received a kidney transplant or need one.
He explained that the situation of a person with renal disease who does not have some type of medical insurance is paradoxical.
On the one hand, Tijuana's General Hospital has the best equipment to perform these transplants, he said.
But the hospital cannot treat renal patients through the government's basic health plan, called Seguro Popular, because of the high cost of treatment and medication for this procedure.
Vizcarra, 69, received treatment for renal disease for a year until January 2009, when the received a kidney from a person who had died.
Two relatives had agreed to be donors for him but they were not good matches, he said.
His experience along the way to his transplant revealed the torturous process patients endure in the state who are waiting a kidney donation, he said. He's thankful to God to having received one and acknowledges the many have not been so fortunate.
Since founding the association two years ago, he said, a dozen renal patients have died waiting for a transplant, among them children and young women, but 18 people received the life-saving operation.
Baja California Health Secretary José Guadalupe Bustamante acknowledges that works needs to be done to encourage a culture of organ donation but said the number of transplants has been going up in the state.
Last year, there were 78 transplants, two more than in 2010, most of them cornea operations.
Baja California ranks eighth in Mexico for this type of surgery.
Bustamente estimates that there could be 100 transplants this year.
He said the state is participating in a new federal program that that makes the entire donation process more efficient. He said that as soon as the family of a person who has died gives its OK, all hospitals in the country are notified.
Organs are rushed to hospitals with patients cleared for transplants.
In October, a heart donated in Tijuana was sent to Mexico City, where it was transplanted, saving the life of the patient, he said.
Mexico's basic health insurance will have $31.4 million available this year to cover the cost of renal transplants for children, according to Mexican Congressman Miguel Antonio Osuna.
Dr. Ismael González, of the state council to facilitate transplants, said the problem is not so much a lack of funding for such operations. It's a lack of awareness that there are programs to encourage transplants and a lack of a public campaign to encourage such donations.
A source of potential organs are people who have been diagnosed as brain dead. González said there were six such individuals in the state last year who could have each provided multiple organs.
But because their families took too long to decide no transplantations were done.
Omar.millan@sandiegored.com
