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The compulsory organ donation was resisted by lawyers and human rights defenders during the first meeting, which discussed the new bill on organ donation and transplantation of human organs.

The bill, which the Council of Ministers approved last week, regulates the system of donation and transplantation of organs from living and deceased donors in Greece. It implements the EU Directive 2010/45/EE of the European Parliament and the European Council relating to the security and quality of human organs to be transplanted, and formulates the measures and procedures for its implementation.
 
The ninth article of the law is the most discussed one as it is linked to the compulsory donation of organs from a deceased donor if he or she is an adult and meets all the requirements thereof. Otherwise, the citizens can sign a certificate that they do not want to donate and should submit it to the National Transplant Organization. This prompted the reactions from the opposition party New Democracy and the skepticism of some participants in the discussion "Reality, necessity and prospects for transplantation in Greece" held in the Zapio Congress Centre in Athens. According to Nikos Karafolas, compulsory donation of organs is applied only in Austria and Luxembourg, while the consent of the relatives of the donor is required in other European countries. The legal adviser Takis Vidalis, in turn, raised the topic of bioethics and said that the issue of human rights should be addressed and that the body is owned by us ourselves and this provision could be interpreted as being in violation of this human right.

The data indicate that Greece is among the last in the list of European countries with the smallest number of donors. Their number in Spain is higher - 34.5 per million people, while Bulgaria ranks last with 1.1 people per million. The number in Greece is 6.9 people per million in the best cases, said the chairman of the National Health Council Andreas Seretis.

The number of people waiting for heart, kidneys or lungs transplantation is steadily increasing as well as the number of patients who may die because of lack of donors, added Seretis. He said that strict rules are necessary, but it is also necessary to shorten waiting terms in the lists. He stressed that the bill meets the requirements for quality and safety for donation, operation, storage, transport and transplantation of organs, but then made some remarks. According to him, the measures regarding the quality are not currently designated as it is necessary to ensure that no trade of organ transplantation will be carried out. "If the waiting lists increase, trade of organs will increase too," said Seretis. It is necessary to discuss the directive, which states that anyone who has not stated that he or she does not wish to become a donor remains a potential donor.

The president of the National Health Council highlighted several important points during the discussion on the bill. He stressed the need for making the transplantations in the same hospital in which the organ is donated. He argued that there are not proper security conditions for the organs during their transportation. "The organs transportation is like the transportation of a seriously ill patient and the emergency staff should treat them alike," he noted. "Not everyone can have a license to make heart transplantations," continued Seretis and said also that the sentences should be more stringent. The president of the National Health Council gave as an example a physician and director of a clinic in a German city, who was bribed to make transplantation to a patient who was further back in the waiting list. The court revoked his practice licenses and ruled out three years of imprisonment.

"The reasons that there are no donors in Greece are mostly because there are no specialized personnel, the donors can not be identified, and the relatives often disagree," said the Director of the National Centre for Health Operations Ioannis Ksenelis and added that informing the relatives and the transfer of the organs are among the most important components for success of the procedure and they need special attention.

"The National Transplantation Centre has not done enough to make its activity popular over the past decade and its activity is significant. Its concern is to control trade in organs and establish positive attitude in citizens to the idea of ​​organ transplantation," said the President of the National Transplantation Centre Ioannis Vlahoyanis. He noted that the centre employees only 3-4 people on the payroll, although it should have over 20 employees under the law. Moreover, Vlahoyanis opposed the idea of approving living donors, who state they are only emotionally related to the patient who needs an organ transplant. In his view, that would "legalize" the trade of organs and the authorization of living donors should be confined in the family circle of the patient's bloodline.
 
"There were only 40 donors in Greece in 2000, and 45 in 2010," alerted the Director of the Onasio Hospital Petros Alivizatos. Donors come mostly from traffic accidents. There have been 1200 deaths but only 12% are potential donors, while this percentage reaches 30 in other countries," Alivizatos said. This difference is due to the fact that the potential donors can not be identified and, in addition to the procedure, the physicians are required to establish brain death, a death certificate to be issued subsequently and the National Transplantation Centre, which undertakes to inform the relatives, to be notified.

The bill on transplants is available on the web page of the Ministry of Health, and the comments from the discussion today will be available there too, said the Minister of Health Andreas Loverdos, who attended the discussion. The bill has three main goals: to widen the circle of donors, to implement the 2010 EU directive on the quality and safety in transplantation and to address the problem of trade of organs, said Loverdos. The Deputy Minister of Health Michalis Timosidis spoke at the discussion as well as Christos Aydonis - a representative of the church, and the Minister of Maritime Affairs Yiannis Diamantidis, who together with a colleague of his made the first proposal for a law on organ transplants in 2007, which was not accepted then.