Quick Facts

Cadaver Versus Living Donors Friends and family members can donate some organs with little detriment to their health. Prime example for living-related donation is kidney donation. The other type of donation is the cadaver donation where organs, instead of being wasted, are donated from people who are brain dead, before stopping the breathing machine that is keeping them alive. Brain death happens from severe brain injury from road traffic accidents or spontaneous bleeding into the brain from various causes such as high blood pressure. Cadaveric organs that can be utilized to save many lives are: heart, lungs, liver, pancreas, intestine and both kidneys.

Most of the hospitals undertaking cadaver transplants are either private or trust hospitals and there are very few government hospitals undertaking this program.
Out of 27 states in India four states are still to enact the 'Transplant legislation' and accept brain death concepts. Hence to make the cadaver program a success a re-think of how to implement this program is necessary. One of the major hurdles seems to be the unrelated transplant activity that continues unabated. Kidney scandals still continue to haunt the country every so often.

By far the largest number of deaths in the 20-44 age groups in India is caused by traffic accidents. Every 10 minutes, somebody dies on a road somewhere in India. Four out of five of these victims are of working age.
The number of fatal road traffic accidents every year in India is constantly rising; to put that in perspective, some 85,000 Indians died in road accidents in 2005-06.
There are six road accidents every hour in Tamil Nadu; one person dies every hour.    

 At any given time there are 8 to 10 brain dead patients in different ICU's in any major city of the country. Hence there is potentially a large potential cadaveric donors available in India.