THE GIFT OF LIFE
Fifty years after the first heart transplant, South Africa is woefully short of organ donors HOW TO REGISTER
COMPILED BY LINDSAY DE FREITAS Professor Christiaan Barnard performed the world’s first human heart transplant on 53-year-old Louis Washkansky in 1967.
FIFTY years ago a cardiac surgeon from Beaufort West took a heart into his hands and – incredibly, miraculously – transferred it into a human body. On 3 December 1967, Professor Christiaan Barnard performed the world’s first human heart transplant at Groote Schuur Hospital, Cape Town, putting South Africa on the medical map.
Half a century later that procedure remains a major breakthrough in the history of medicine. And yet fewer and fewer heart transplants are taking place in SA every year.
In fact, in the past 17 years the number of heart transplants done in the country has dropped by nearly half because of a lack of registered donors.
According to the Organ Donor Foundation, fewer than two out of every million South Africans are organ donors.
“People in South Africa aren’t educated enough about what exactly organ donation entails,” explains Samantha Nicholls, executive director of the Organ Donor Foundation. “The problem isn’t that South Africans are forbidden because of ethnic and religious reasons but rather that people don’t understand what the process entails.”
Although they do regular awareness campaigns, the organisation can’t afford to conduct them on a large scale.
That’s why a teenager from Cape Town took it upon herself to do just that.
Jenna Lowe was diagnosed with pulmonary hypertension – a rare, degenerative and life-threatening lung disease – when she was just 16.
Jenna fought the illness for three years until it became clear a lung transplant was her only hope of survival. She was placed on the donor list in May 2014.
The teen started the #GetMeTo21 campaign from her sickbed, campaigning for South Africans to register as organ donors – not just to find the set of lungs she so desperately needed but to help save others on the transplant list.
The campaign, which was run on social media, increased the registration growth rate by an incredible 267%.
Jenna received her lungs in December
SSS2014 but died in June 2015 – just four months shy of her 21st birthday.
“The lungs were an excellent match but her body was racked by kidney failure, appendicitis and pancreatitis among many other things that had gone wrong,” her family wrote on her website after the tragedy. Her mom, Gabi, is still crusading on her daughter’s behalf as director of the Jenna Lowe Trust.
SA’s donor statistics have to change, she says. “I believe what’s needed is a massive education and awareness drive at high schools, at universities and in the media. There’s way too much confusion.
“Jenna’s dying wish was to encourage more people to become organ donors in SA and to start a lung transplant unit for state patients.”
Register online at odf.org.za or call the Organ Donor Foundation’s toll-free number, 0800-226-611.
You need to make sure your family members are aware of your decision.
You get an organ donor card to keep in your wallet and stickers for your ID and driver’s licence to indicate you’re an organ donor.
(Turn over for more on transplants)