Nguoi Viet, News Report, Posted: Apr 20, 2011

 About 90 people of Vietnamese descent are on waiting lists for a kidney in the Orange County and Los Angeles regions, hoping that a donor’s kidney will become available for transplant to restore them to health.

Yet the likelihood of that actually happening is not encouraging for many patients because of a shortage of organs.

Only seven Vietnamese in the region got a kidney transplant in 2009, as well as seven others from January through September of 2010, according to figures from the national Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN).

For people of all ethnicities, there were 810 kidney transplants in 2009 from deceased donors and 645 for the first nine months of 2010. These figures represent just a fraction of the more than 6,000 patients on the region’s kidney wait list.

The situation is not unique to Vietnamese or to Southern California. Kidneys are the organs in greatest need for transplant throughout the United States. Of 110,000 people on current organ wait lists nationwide, nearly 88,000 need a kidney. In contrast, during 2009 — the last full year for which statistics are available — 10,400 kidney transplants were performed.

There is “a tremendous gap” between the number of people needing transplants and the supply of human organs, especially kidneys, said Dr. Robert Mendez, professor of surgery at the USC Keck School of Medicine. Mendez is also president of OneLegacy, a nonprofit agency that promotes organ and tissue donation in Orange, Los Angeles and five surrounding counties.

The gap has resulted from several factors. The number of organ donations has leveled off in recent years while the number of people needing transplants, especially for kidneys, has grown.

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