Parents should "keep an eye on their children"? Such insinuations are malicious rumors. Shanghai establishes a children's organ transplant center

"Summer vacation is coming, everyone must keep an eye on your children", "Organ transplantation is aimed at children", "No buying, no harm"... Recently, some netizens interpreted the "Shanghai Children's Large Organ Transplant Center" in this way on the Internet and posted related videos, which sparked discussion.

An investigation by the Shanghai Rumor Refutation Platform found that the relevant remarks were a distorted interpretation of the establishment of the "Children's Major Organ Transplant Center" at the Children's Hospital Affiliated to Fudan University, National Children's Medical Center, on May 21 this year. They were malicious associations, sinister insinuations, and rumors and slander that disregarded the facts, and their sinister intentions were obvious.

What is the real situation? The reporter interviewed the Children's Hospital Affiliated to Fudan University to clarify.

Professor Dong Kuiran, deputy secretary of the Party Committee of the Children's Hospital Affiliated to Fudan University and the incoming chairman of the Pediatric Surgery Committee of the Shanghai Medical Association, told reporters that pediatric organ transplantation is a key technology to ignite the light of life for children with end-stage organ failure, and is also an important indicator widely recognized internationally for evaluating the comprehensive clinical diagnosis and treatment capabilities of a city or a hospital. Therefore, the National Health Commission is very strict in approving the qualifications of organ transplant institutions. At present, only a very small number of domestic tertiary children's specialty hospitals are qualified for organ transplantation. Fudan Pediatrics is the only children's specialty hospital in the city that is qualified for heart, liver, and kidney organ transplantation.

How are organs obtained in pediatric organ transplants? Experts emphasize that every potential organ donation case needs to be reviewed by both hospital and municipal experts to confirm that the disease condition meets the organ donation indications before the subsequent organ donation process can be initiated by the OPO unit designated by the Municipal Health Commission and the officially certified organ donation coordinator. The final organ donation and acquisition are also witnessed by Red Cross staff and organ donation coordinators. On the other hand, the government has built the "China Human Organ Allocation and Sharing Computer System" platform to uniformly manage organ donation and allocation across the country. Every case waiting for transplantation needs to be registered in this system. In accordance with the principle of double-blindness between donors and recipients, the COTRS system has detailed allocation rules, including age, region, disease status scores, etc., to promote the allocation of every donated organ to a suitable recipient patient.

Among the three major organ transplants currently performed on children, namely heart, liver and kidney, liver transplantation is mainly autologous liver transplantation, and the vast majority of livers are donated by the parents of the children. The donors for heart transplants are all allocated through the COTRS system network, and the majority of donors for children's kidney transplants are also from the COTRS system, with only a small number of kidneys coming from autologous donors. Regardless of whether it is COTRS network allocation or autologous organ transplantation, ethical review is required before the transplantation operation, and there are clear requirements for the materials for the ethical review, and no supporting materials can be omitted. Especially for autologous transplantation, in addition to written materials, the donor's parents must also be interviewed and examined to confirm that there is no "fake parent" situation of buying and selling organs.

Data shows that since the pediatric hospital was approved as an organ transplant institution in August 2022, it has performed a total of 116 organ transplant operations, including 102 kidney transplants, 10 liver transplants and 4 heart transplants. It is also the children's specialty hospital with the largest number of kidney transplants in China in 2023, and has achieved high-difficulty technical breakthroughs including "extremely low body weight double donor kidney block" kidney transplantation, extremely low body weight donor kidney single kidney transplantation, high PRA pre-sensitized recipient secondary kidney transplantation, and intergenerational relative kidney transplantation for children. The hospital strictly follows the National Health Commission's organ acquisition and allocation system, improves the level of organ transplantation technology, ensures the quality of transplantation and the safety of children, and has made significant contributions to the promotion of children's kidney transplantation across the country, clarifying the basic principle that children's donated kidneys are used first for children.

Organ transplantation is the hope for saving the lives of children with end-stage organ failure. Professor Wang Yi, president of Fudan Children's Hospital, said that the hospital has established a large organ transplant center to integrate the heart, liver and kidney transplant teams, as well as multidisciplinary support teams such as critical care medicine and anesthesia, to improve the full-chain multidisciplinary system of "pre-transplantation assessment-registration-surgery-post-transplantation follow-up" in order to better meet the needs of children and protect their lives and health.

Some netizens disregarded science and maliciously interpreted this, which was not only a bottom-line creation of hot spots and a "information trap" that mixed the real and the fake, but also a disregard for public interests, unscrupulous means and a loss of bottom line. After the relevant false news was released, it was also used by some hostile forces abroad with ulterior motives to link it with the missing teenagers case without reason, becoming a cannon to maliciously smear China, which had extremely bad consequences.

The Internet is not a lawless place. Netizens should be careful to identify these unscrupulous rumor-mongering behaviors and not be led astray by these false information. The platforms that publish relevant rumors should take real responsibility and not provide any breeding ground for these illegal information.

It is reported that the Internet Information Office has investigated the relevant remarks and transferred the relevant illegal clues to the public security organs for further handling.