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piqer for: Global finds Health and Sanity Doing Good
Bangalore-based Rashmi Vasudeva's journalism has appeared in many Indian and international publications over the past decade. A features writer with over nine years of experience heading a health and fitness supplement in a mainstream Indian newspaper, her niche areas include health, wellness, fitness, food, nutrition and Indian classical Arts.
Her articles have appeared in various publications including Mint-Wall Street Journal, The Hindu, Deccan Herald (mainstream South Indian newspaper), Smart Life (Health magazine from the Malayala Manorama Group of publications), YourStory (India's media technology platform for entrepreneurs), Avantika (a noir arts and theatre magazine), ZDF (a German public broadcasting company) and others.
In 2006, she was awarded the British Print-Chevening scholarship to pursue a short-term course in new-age journalism at the University of Westminster, U.K. With a double Masters in Globalisation and Media Studies from Aarhus Universitet (Denmark), University of Amsterdam and Swansea University in Wales, U.K., she has also dabbled in academics, travel writing and socio-cultural studies. Mother to a frisky toddler, she hums 'wheels on the bus' while working and keeps a beady eye on the aforementioned toddler's antics.
Organ Donation: Spain's Doing Great And Other Countries Are Ready To Emulate
Organs do not recognise borders. And yet Spain leads the world in organ donation by a large margin.
Medical advances in organ transplantation have progressed greatly with significant improvements in both surgical methods and post-operative therapies. Organ donations can be made from both living and deceased donors; one organ or tissue donor can save up to eight lives! And yet, shortage of organs remains one of the greatest medical challenges worldwide.
Spain though has bucked the trend and it is vital for the rest of the world to understand the reasons and perhaps emulate them. Statistics reveal that 2,183 people in Spain became organ donors last year after they died. This is not a small figure; according to the standard way of measuring the rate of donation, this is 46.9 per million people in the population (pmp).
The main cause for this extraordinary success (Spain has been the clear leader in organ donation for the past 26 years) seems to be its policy of ‘presumed consent’. That is, once a person dies, consent for organ donation is presumed even if they have not registered as a donor unless the patient chooses to ‘opt out’.
It goes without saying that such efforts to boost the number of donors can have splendid consequences. Consider this: Spain's 2,183 donors in 2017 made 5,260 transplant surgeries possible, including over 3,000 kidney transplants and 1,200 liver transplants.
It is not just laws but also religious dogmas that limit the number of organs donated worldwide. Nevertheless, the good news is, countries are trying to follow Spain’s example. Britain is considering introducing the opt-out system to boost organ donations and the NHS is also working with leaders of all faiths to increase donor rates. The Netherlands recently passed an opt-out law and Croatia has implemented a system similar to Spain's with great success.
As one of the recipients says in the article, there ought to come a time when people cannot understand why someone wouldn’t want to be a donor.
