What Bill says on body parts donation

Kenya: Widowed women may soon be able to donate their late spouses’ bodies or organs to research institutions if they die without writing a will.

In addition, it may soon be lawful for one to receive payment for the trouble of donating a body organ to another party.

The proposal also makes it legal for the Cabinet Secretary to donate unclaimed bodies or parts of bodies to research and training institutions or medical use.

The controversial proposals are part of the new Health Bill 2014. It says that in the absence of a will indicating how the body should be disposed of when the person dies, close relatives, number one being the wife, will have the right to donate the body for research, training or replacement purposes.

Although the Bill makes it clear there should be no commercial harvesting body organs, it allows a donor to be paid for unspecified costs and the trouble involved in the exercise.

The Billl does not say the amounts that would be involved, but suggests donors could be legally compensated for things like transport costs or time away from gainful employment.

This open-ended clause may be interpreted to mean surrogate mothers would be able to claim for payments, and even resort to court for arbitration in case of a dispute. This could also be true for other organ donations.

“It is an offence for a person who has donated organ to receive any form of financial or other reward for such donation, except for the reimbursement of reasonable costs incurred in the donation exercise,” says the proposed law.

Just to make sure poor people are not lured to backstreet clinics to have their organs harvested for money, the Act says such an operation can only be carried out in a duly licensed facility by qualified medical personnel.

However, any expert authorised to harvest an organ cannot be the lead doctor in the transplant of the same to another individual.

“This is expected to check unscrupulous medical workers becoming middlemen in a possible body parts trade. It is possible to create a false demand as happens with the lucrative market of C-section births,” says Mr Abote Akoko, a lab technician in Kisumu.

Breaking the law would attract a jail term of five years and a fine a million shillings or both. The Bill also allows the Cabinet Secretary for Health to draft more laws defining the type of facilities that can harvest or transplant body organs in the country.

A boon for the many medical training institutions coming up is a suggestion that people who are competent to make a will can donate their bodies or specified parts to be used for research, training or other medical purposes after their death. Such a will can be made in writing or verbally in front of witnesses, but the donor must specify to which institution the donation is being made.

Also for the first time the country attempts to legally address the emerging issue of ethical use of stem cell research.

Clone human being

In a chapter that proposes to repeal the current Human Tissue Act, the words stem cell research for the first time are introduced in to Kenya’s legal lexicon. Anyone wishing to carry out such research in Kenya would have to get express permission from the Cabinet Secretary for Health as well as the person donating the cells.

In the chapter, which seems to give most of the powers to the Cabinet Secretary, no person can clone another human being without the written permission of the CS.

One provision that could put CS Macharia on a collision course with genetically modified food (GMO) lobbyists and companies says that no person shall be allowed to manipulate any genetic code, including that from human tissue. This could be used to block genetic manipulation of crops to, for instance, produce disease-resistant or high-yielding varieties.

Kenya is already under pressure to lift the ban on GMOs placed in 2012 and the Health ministry largely depends on US funding for its programmes.

In March, a posting on the ministry’s website asked Kenyans to send it their views on GMOs to be included in new legislation for the sector.