Transplant-waiting children victims of crisis

ZOE MARTANO is no stranger to misery. At six, she has spent half of her life in and out of a Venezuelan hospital, being prodded and poked, rushed to the ICU and hooked up to IV lines meant to keep her alive until her country’s crises dissipate.

Only then might the young leukemia victim be able to undergo the bone marrow transplant doctors say she desperately needs.

Except for a few charity-aided cases, poor Venezuelan children have not received organ or bone marrow transplants since 2017. Dozens of children have died since, including 25 this year, according to a parent organisation. Only the wealthy in this socialist country can get a transplant.

For Andrea Velázquez, Zoe’s mom, the lives of her daughter and t he other roughly 150 children awaiting transplants are in the hands of the government of President Nicolás Maduro.

“It is very difficult to explain to a mother who lost her son that ‘Look, we don’t have the resources to make the hospital optimal to do a transplant’,” Velázquez said.

“If the resources were better managed, obviously, we would have better hospitals and we would not be going through what we are going through.”

The troubled South American country once had a successful transplant programme. Between 1967 and 2000, more than 3,100 kidney procedures alone took place. By 2016, that number would more than double, thanks to a public-private partnership that included public awareness campaigns, an organ procurement system and assistance for lowincome patients.

The National Transplant Organization of Venezuela, which was privately administered and publicly funded, served minors and adults in need of a variety of organs, including heart, liver and kidneys. But, after Maduro took office following the death of President Hugo Chavez in 2013, the government demanded full control of the programme.

In June 2017, health officials told the country’s 14 transplant centres that they would be closed for three months to resolve medicationrelated issues, according to Lucila Cárdenas de Velutini, a member of the organisation’s board of directors. The service interruption became permanent.

The country now lacks a programme to harvest organs from dead people, which was overseen by the organisation.

AP Angel Cespedes, 14, is held by his mother Yohelys on their bus ride home after they both got dialysis treatment in Caracas, Venezuela, Monday, Nov 8, 2021. Both Angel and his mother have been on dialysis for years and are in need of kidney transplants.