In Dresden, the World Transplant Games want to draw attention to the topic of organ donation. The special event shows what can be achieved with organ donation, said Axel Rahmel, Medical Director of the German Organ Transplantation Foundation (DSO). You can see "how the athletes accept the gift of new life and try to achieve the best they can." Rahmel hopes that the special world championships will have a signal effect: people can see what good can be done with a donation beyond death.
Long waiting times for patients
Professor Eberhard Schollmeyer from the TransDia Sport association received a donor organ himself around 40 years ago. Back then, he waited three months for a kidney and everything happened "very quickly", even for the time. "It's now been about ten years." In order to raise awareness of the issue, the international association of the World Transplant Games Federation decided to hold the competitions in Germany for the first time.
Schollmeyer criticized the organ donation policy in Germany as backward compared to other European countries. "If the rest of the world had an organ donation policy like Germany, half of the participants would have died long ago. And if Germany had a policy like the rest of Europe, the German team would be twice as big," said Schollmeyer.
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