Organ transplants | A dire donor shortage

In death, Janmesh Lenka saved two lives. On March 1, when the 15-year-old was declared brain-dead at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) Bhubaneswar, his parents made the courageous—and compassionate—decision to allow his organs to be used for transplants. Lenka’s liver was retrieved and transported to the Institute of Liver and Biliary Sciences (ILBS) in Delhi, where it was given to a child with end-stage liver failure, while his kidneys were transplanted into an adolescent at AIIMS Bhubaneswar itself. “These procedures were impossible to do a decade ago…there is no denying the advancements made in transplant technology,” says Dr Sanjeev Lalwani, professor of forensic medicine at the JPN Apex Trauma Centre in AIIMS Delhi. An equally complex procedure was performed on a 10-month-old boy from Karur in Tamil Nadu, at the G Kuppuswamy Naidu Memorial Hospital in Coimbatore, where bone marrow from a brain-dead donor was transplanted to treat his deficiency of MALT1, a protein crucial to the immune system. A few years back, the medical diagnosis would have meant a death sentence.