title: [Organ transplantation in Israel of 2007--reality and vision].
abstract: The situation of organ transplantation in Israel has currently reached a crossroad. The number of patients on the waiting list increases from one year to another, but the availability of organs remains, more or less, the same as in the last decade. As a result, the medical condition of the patients on the waiting list deteriorates and each year some 7% of these patients died before an organ could be procured for saving their lives. Since 1994 the organ transplantation system in Israel is nationally controlled by the Israel Transplant Center (ITC) which employs transplantation teams (a physician and at least one registered nurse) acting in each general hospital. ITC and the teams proceed in the direction of identification of potential donors after brain death, hemodynamic stabilization, talks with the patient's family aiming to obtain acceptance for donating the deceased person's organs and the logistic aspects of organ harvesting and transplantation. This review presents the up to date parameters of organ transplantation in Israel and compares this information with some data from other countries. The data from last year placed Israel on the lower part of the list of developed countries regarding the availability of organs for transplantation: 9 donors per million inhabitants (in comparison to 35 in Spain or 25 in the USA). Furthermore, a lower percentage of the Israeli adult population (9.4% as per March 2008) signed a donor card, thereby expressing the intention to donate organs after death. Finally, some ideas for improving the situation of organ donation in this country are proposed, among them a continuous campaign for increasing population awareness regarding organ donation, the use of non-heart beating donor organs, the use of expanded criteria for donated organs, development of a system of pair exchange in case of immunologic incompatibility between the donor and the recipient or the use of solutions and machines for organ perfusion in order to increase the viability time of the harvested organ.
authors.affiliation: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and Israel Transplant Center. gurman@bgu.ac.il
authors.forename: Gabriel M
authors.initials: GM
authors.lastname: Gurman
mesh_terms: D003327:Coronary Disease / Q000601:surgery; D016027:Heart Transplantation / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D006801:Humans; D007676:Kidney Failure, Chronic / Q000601:surgery; D016030:Kidney Transplantation / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D008107:Liver Diseases / Q000601:surgery; D016031:Liver Transplantation / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D016377:Organ Transplantation / Q000706:statistics & numerical data* / Q000639:trends*