Editorial | Baby Cleo living proof of organ cooperation
- Heart donation from mainland child for four-month-old city girl should help pave way to transparent and legal process for further cross-border collaboration
A tiny medical miracle is raising big hopes for Hong Kong patients awaiting organ transplants. The smallest heart ever transplanted in the city was given to a local baby girl last Friday after an unprecedented effort to secure the organ from a donor on the mainland. Four-month-old Cleo Lai Tsz-hei suffered from heart failure and urgently needed a transplant.
When an urgent public appeal failed to turn up a donor, the Hospital Authority contacted the National Health Commission. The mainland agency found a heart belonging to a child who had succumbed to a severe head injury. No suitable recipients were found in the mainland’s database, and Cleo was a match.
In the first cross-border arrangement of its kind, the organ was transferred to Hong Kong Children’s Hospital in about three hours with the support of about 24 mainland and Hong Kong departments and 65 medical personnel. China Organ Transplant Response System founder Dr Wang Haibo described it as a race against time. Heart transplants should happen within four hours.
Such cooperation should be warmly welcomed. Hong Kong has long struggled to find enough organ donors and transplant numbers have declined during the pandemic. Nearly 3,000 patients in the city were awaiting organ transplants as of late September. Secretary for Health Lo Chung-mau hopes Cleo’s case will pave the way for long-term mechanisms for matching and cross-border organ imports.
Organs are regularly transported across borders around the world, but Hong Kong and the mainland have until now kept separate networks to match donors with patients. Mainland hospitals have long relied on their own connections to find donations, a practice that opened the system to abuse. In 2013, Beijing set up a centralised database to regulate the process. Hong Kong has strict laws to regulate such imports. Medical ethics and patient needs must always be balanced, but policies should be grounded in facts.
Our thoughts are with baby Cleo and the families of donor and recipient, as we look forward to more life-saving cross-border cooperation supported by transparency and sound legal procedures.