Chinanews, Haikou, May 22 – China is facing a shortage of organ supply. In light of this situation, Wang Jianrong, deputy head of the Policymaking Department under the Ministry of Health (MOH), recently said that the Ministry of Health is considering gradually allowing more donors to donate their living organs. However, in order to curb organ transaction activities, at present such living organ transplant is only permitted among relatives, while people who have no relationship by blood are not allowed to donate their organs to patients.He made the statement while attending an organ transplant seminar held in Sanya, Hainan Province, last Sunday.In China, about 1.5 million patients need to take organ transplant surgeries every year. However, only 10,000 of them can really get the organs they need. In 2004, about 7,000 kidney transplant surgeries were done in China and only 4% of them were done with living organs, far below the world average level.On May 1, 2007, China enacted the "Regulations on Human Organ Transplant". The regulation stipulates that no organizations or individuals are allowed to trade in human organs, nor any activities related with human organ selling and buying. China is trying to expand the donating group step by step. Right now, three groups of people are allowed to participate in living organ donations: the organ recipient is the spouse or a directly-related member of the donors family; or the recipient is a collateral relative of the donor’s family within three generations; or it is proved that the recipient and the donor have established a sort of kinship relation by supporting each other’s life.So far, the Ministry of Health has not given a definition to clarify what it means by “establishing a sort of kinship relation by supporting each other’s life.” According to Wang, MOH currently is still encouraging organ transplant surgeries to be done among close relatives, such as among siblings, between parents and children, and between husbands and wives. If there is a case in which the recipient and the donor have established “a kinship relation through supporting each other”, such situation will be dealt with as a special case. Despite this, MOH will not allow organ transplant surgeries to be taken among strangers. In addition, for the husband and the wife, the regulation does not specify as to how many years the couple should have been married before they can donate their organs to each other. The regulation also stipulates that no organizations or individuals should get living organs from people under the age of 18.