A photo of an airplane of China Southern Airlines (Photo : Reuters)
The deputy director of Wuxi People’s Hospital, Chen Jingyu stated that a mere 60 out of 300 donated lungs in China had been successfully transplanted in the first half of 2015. Chen blames the country’s poor transport system for problems in human organ transplantation.
Chen has headed the world's fifth largest lung transplant center and is recognized as the top lung transplant surgeon in China.
"Different from some developed countries, China solely relies on civil aviation to transport organs. The donated lungs must be implanted within 12 hours, but the surgery takes about five hours. The time left to transport organs is limited," Chen said.
After a recent incident by an organ transport team with a local airline, he calls the attention of the health and civil aviation authorities to create a more efficient transport system for donated organs.
It happened on a Sunday when a team commissioned to transport organs was not allowed to board a flight because they arrived at the airport 15 minutes before the plane left the Guangzhou airport. China Southern Airlines claimed that being caught in a traffic jam, as the team reasoned out, is not a valid reason.
Despite informing the airline a day before the actual flight, the manager on duty denied them passage because they have a 30-45 minute boarding procedure. The airline staff was clearly following the country's civil aviation regulations.
The team had to book another ticket with Shenzhen Airlines in a race through time, where they had to wait for 1 hour and 30 minutes. An organ transport team member, Dr. Liu Dong said that his team only spent 15 minutes with the Shenzhen Airlines' boarding procedures.
"They informed airport security, air traffic control and the plane's crew as soon as they learned that we were transporting human organs. The whole process was very efficient," according to Liu.
When the team finally arrived and delivered the organs to the hospital at noontime, the doctors immediately performed lung transplant operations to their patients.
"It took more than nine hours to transport the lungs after they were harvested from the donor. That's eating into the longest time window for lung transplants. If there was no seat available on the Shenzhen Airlines plane, the donated lungs would have gone to waste," exclaimed Chen. "Many of them were unusable because it took too long to transport them."
In the past, the transplant center had no problem working with China Southern Airlines, which was even used by the team to transport a set of lungs from Guangzhou to Wuxi back in 2014.
