The Diplomat
Last year, Spain accounted for 19 percent of organ donations in the EU and 5 percent of those registered in the world, despite the fact that Spain barely represents 9 percent of the European population and 0.6 percent of the world’s population.
The Ministry of Health stresses that with these figures, Spain maintains its world leadership in organ donation in 2020, despite the pandemic.
What is more, despite the decrease in Spanish activity due to the pandemic, the figures registered by our country in 2020 were much higher than those of any other country in the world during the years prior to the health crisis. “These data show the resilience and recovery capacity of our transplant system in a highly complex epidemiological environment,” they point out, highlighting the work of the National Transplant Organisation (ONT).
In terms of transplant activity, Spain reached a rate of 94.6 transplants p.m.p. in 2020, a figure only surpassed by the United States, with 120.6 transplants p.m.p., partly due to its significant living donor transplant activity.
These data come from the latest report of the World Transplant Registry, which the ONT has been managing for 15 years as a collaborating centre of the World Health Organisation (WHO). Its data are collected annually in the Council of Europe’s “Transplant Newsletter”, published on the ONT website.
According to the World Registry, 122,341 transplants were performed in 2020 in the 82 countries that participated in this edition. Of these, 76,397 were kidney transplants (30% living donor), 30,275 liver transplants (18% living donor), 7,840 heart transplants, 5,765 lung transplants, 1,910 pancreas transplants and 151 intestine transplants.
