Karachi:Sindh Institute of Urology and Transplantation (SIUT) announced Tuesday that its transplantation activities which went into abeyance due to COVID-19 will resume soon.
SIUT had suspended its transplantation activities temporarily when the pandemic broke in March earlier this year as the life of transplanted patients were threatened due to their reduced immunity and reliance on life saving drugs. This practice is universally followed and SIUT was no exception.
According to Dr Sikander Ali Memon, Chief Technical Officer and Coordinator for COVID in the Sindh Government, 27 centers in the province are equipped with 403 beds in ICUs and over a thousand in High Dependency Units (HDU) which performed clinical activities round the clock.
The number of daily diagnosed cases has also reached very low in recent weeks bringing the decline to mortality rate sharply. There are more and adequate facilities to cater to the patients now which unsurpassed in the country. During the pandemic, the SIUT which was actively involved in treating the COVID patients the institute tested 11,600 persons and treated 3500 patients since March.
Elaborating the policy of resuming the transplantation activities, a spokesman of SIUT said: “We feel that time has come to provide urgent relief to patients who are on the waiting list.” The number of such patients is nearly 90 he pointed out. SIUT is the largest transplant center in the country which has done over 6200 renal transplants from family donors.