Pilot scheme in China aims at improving transplant accessibility

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Zhou Huili has been waiting seven months for a suitable liver.

The 55-year-old has been suffering from cirrhosis of the liver for many years, brought on by hepatitis B, and her condition is now critical. Unable to eat more than a bowl of noodles a day, she has lost half her body weight.

Zhou and her husband Yang Yongqing are staying in a budget hotel near Beijing, waiting for news that a liver match has been found.

The couple are farmers from a small village in Henan Province in central China, and they have been saving every penny to pay for Zhou's operation. The cost, including hospital stay, is likely to amount to around 650,000 yuan, or nearly 100,000 U.S. dollars.

Every year, some 300,000 patients with terminal diseases in China require a life-saving organ transplant. However, only 20,000 operations were performed last year. One reason for the shortfall is the lack of suitable organs; the other is the high cost.

"The surgery is expensive," Yang says. "People told me we'd use up all our savings before the operation. It looks like that's the case."

According to an April 2018 report in the medical journal The Lancet, hepatitis-B is described as a "truly silent epidemic" in China.

The report quotes World Health Organization findings that, of 240 million people worldwide suffering from chronic hepatitis-B in 2017, one third were living in China.

The Lancet goes on to state that 28 million sufferers in China required treatment, and that in seven million cases, action was "urgent because of advanced liver disease and the high risk of developing cancer."

In the most severe cases, a transplant is often the last resort.

"At our transplant center, there are 50 to 60 patients waiting for a new liver," says Dr. Zhu Zhijun, director of the liver transplant center at Beijing Friendship Hospital. "On average, they wait two to three months."

Dr. Zhu has seen many patients who simply give up due to the high cost of a transplant. The experience has moved him to advocate for more reasonable pricing of cadaver liver transplants, and for liver transplants to be included in the national medicare system.

"With medical insurance, people would feel less pressure," Dr. Zhu says.

On January 1, 2018, a pilot medicare scheme to cover 70 percent of the cost of a liver transplant was launched in four hospitals in Zhejiang Province in eastern China. The scheme will last five years. If it proves successful, it will be expanded to include other hospitals across China.

To know more about Zhou Huili's story, stay tuned to CGTN's "Rediscovering China" program on May 12.