Santo Domingo.- Though the waiting list of the country’s patients who need an organ transplant is long, many organs harvested by a specialized team of doctors are lost because of the transplant’s cost  and the lack of resources to cover them, the president of National Transplants Coordination Institute (Incort) revealed yesterday.

Fernando Morales Billini said their waiting list is of more than 300 people who need a liver transplant and around 1,500 would need a kidney every year, but most are poor people attended in public hospitals, where there are not enough funds to pay for them and those with health insurance cannot access them either because the ARS don’t cover the basic tests for it, which he said are very expensive.

To prove why the country’s transplant program needs funding, the physician noted the high cost of a lab histocompatibility and a tissue bank. He said a kidney transplant costs around 860,000 pesos.

SOURCE: listin.com.do