A high-ranking Chinese health official on Sunday called for increasing human organ donations to meet the country's great clinical demand.

Huang Jiefu, vice minister of health, told a seminar that the scarce supply of human organs has been a major obstacle for human organ transplants in China, citing that there is a huge gap between the patients who need functional organs and limited donations.

Statistics show that about 1.5 million patients need organ transplants each year, but only 10,000 can find organs, he said. "Human organ donations are far from the clinical demand."

In China, most organs are donated by ordinary citizens upon their death after the voluntary signing of donation agreements. Medical experts believe that if organs were allowed to be removed from people declared "brain-dead", the organ supply would be increased significantly.

However, Chinese people's traditional view of "living till the last breath" has prevented them donating their organs, which has been blamed chiefly for the insufficiency of organ supply.

In addition, the lack of brain-dead criteria and malpractice of some medical institutions not only wasted precious resource of human organs but also endangered recipients' safety.

"China will seek to change people's traditional view and encourage a humanitarian spirit of helping each other. It will also seek to establish an information network on registration and distribution of human organ donations to increase the supply of organs," Huang said.

He disclosed that the Ministry of Health has worked out relevant criteria on brain-dead, while he did not provide further details.

"Nevertheless, China will likely carry out different criteria on brain-dead and breath and heartbeat stop in a parallel manner in a very long period of time to come, leaving people on their own to choose appropriate death criterion," he said.

The State Council, China's cabinet, on Wednesday adopted regulations to tighten the control on human organ transplants, banning live organ donation by people under 18 years old and also human organ trading.

The regulations say that the donation of organs should respect the will of donors and be conducted voluntarily.

The regulations have been made in accordance with worldwide recognized medical ethics and the basic rules of the World Health Organization on human organ transplants, said a statement issued by the State Council on Thursday.

The regulations have been adopted to follow international practices and laws, the statement said.

Although China has been actively working on regulating human organ transplants, Huang said, the country still lags behind others on the legislation and management of organ transplants.

"We still have a long way to go," he said.

(Xinhua News Agency March 26, 2007)