Dr. Rosemary Byanyima, the Executive Director of Mulago National Referral Hospital, has disputed allegations of theft of organs from patients in hospitals in Uganda, saying there are several tests and screening both the patient and donor need to undergo before any organ transplant takes place.
She made the remarks while meeting with MPs on Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee where she revealed that following the successful renal transplant in December 2023, by a team of medical experts from Uganda and counterparts from India and Government, more patients and their donors are going through a series of tests and screening exercise to prepare them for more such surgeries in the near future.
“We are grateful to the Government that they gave us money to be able to perform the maiden organ transplant. As I talk, we are lining up more patients, so we have to do a lot of screening to see the matching, so this business of saying they steal organs from bodies, it can’t happen. We do a lot of screening to prepare patients to see that they really match to be able to transplant,” said Dr. Byanyima.
Dr. Byanyima’s remarks come at the time in November 2022, one citizen Muhamood Kabanda, accused Old Kampala hospital of harvesting his kidney when he was admitted at the facility following a nasty accident.
However, separate investigations by Police and the Uganda Medical and Dental Practitioners Council found that Kabanda was born with only one kidney and that there was never any kidney harvesting as alleged. The Medical Council revealed that the cutting Kabanda had pointed to as the spot where the kidney was extracted was instead an incision that surgeons made on Kabanda’s stomach to remove a tissue that was used to repair his broken skull.
Dr. Byanyima also urged MPs to ensure there are funds availed to train specialists in the departments like reconstructive surgery saying there is increased demand for plastic and reconstructive surgery at Mulago, yet the facility only has one specialist noting, “We also have plastics and reconstructive surgery, we have one specialist, we hope we can train more so we need money to train more specialists especially we need to train more young people who can go and come back.”