Hong Kong (AsiaNews/Agencies) – Organ donation is rare in East Asia. A woman who gave two-thirds of her liver to her husband said the life-saving transplant was worth the risk and urged others to help a dying liver patient in urgent need of a new organ.
The patient in need of a graft, Stephen Lee, 46, was still in a critical condition after a transplant last week was aborted at Pok Fu Lam hospital. Doctors cut open his stomach but stopped the operation when it emerged the liver donor had cancer.
Doctors warned that one in 200 donors die from such donations, stressing that an organ received from a deceased donor would always be preferable.
Past liver donor Ho Sin-yee, a 53-year-old homemaker, appealed to the public to help Lee find a new liver.
She said she did not regret her decision in 1995 to donate two-thirds of her liver to her husband, Chan Kwok-man, when he desperately needed a new one following his cirrhosis.
"I did not think about the danger at all and not much consideration is needed," Ho said. "All I wanted was to save my husband's life."
Organ donation, including from dead people, is not widespread because of East Asia's Confucian traditions.
Two days ago, a glimmer of hope came briefly for Lee but soon slipped away on Tuesday after the family of a brain-dead patient refused to donate his organs.
The Catholic Church has always sought to convince people to accept the practice because it saves lives.
Thanks to the efforts of Card Stephen Kim Sou-hwan (1922-2009), people gradually became aware of the issue in his native South Korea.
In recent years, following the cardinal’s example - who donated his organs at death, South Korean Catholic and Buddhist doctors pushed for organ donations by creating NGOs like One Body One-spirit Movement (OSOB), a Catholic organisation set up by the cardinal himself.
A few days after the cardinal passed away in 2009, donations tripled.