Health officials in Suriname are preparing to perform the country’s first kidney transplant this week.
The operations will be carried out by a team led by Dr. Mirza Idu and Professor Dr. Frederike Bemelman from the Netherlands, supported by some medical specialists from the Academic Hospital Paramaribo (AZP).
Recently, Health Minister Amar Ramadhin finalized a cooperation agreement between Amsterdam UMC and Suriname that led to the implementation of the transplant program.
Amsterdam UMC is the largest kidney transplant center in the Netherlands with 17,000 employees.
According to the Ministry of Health, the kidney transplant program is a sustainable model, in which the knowledge will be transferred by the foreign team to Suriname, to enable local doctors to perform the transplants on their own.
In recent years, the number of kidney patients in Suriname has grown rapidly and as a result, there has been an increase in the number of people who are now dependent on dialysis.
A kidney transplant places a healthy kidney from a living or deceased donor into a person whose kidneys no longer function properly.
The main function of the kidneys is to filter and remove waste, minerals, and fluid from the blood by producing urine. When kidneys lose this filtering ability, harmful levels of fluid and waste accumulate in the body, which can raise blood pressure and result in kidney failure (end-stage renal disease). End-stage renal disease occurs when the kidneys have lost about 90 percent of their ability to function normally.
“People with kidney failure have to do dialysis for four hours, three times a week. They have more or less lost their freedom and besides that they are always tired,” said cardiothoracic surgeon Krishna Khargi at the opening of a renal outpatient clinic last year.
The approach to kidney transplants in Suriname is that potential candidates find a donor in their own family, someone who is healthy and willing to donate a kidney.
The number of kidney patients in Suriname is estimated to be between 800 and 900.
