Hasan Ercakica, spokesman for the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) Presidency, said Wednesday that the Greek Cypriot party tried to use its EU membership as a tool to hamper the removal of isolations on TRNC on all occasions.

General Directorate of Religious Affairs affiliated to the state snt a circular to mufti offices to encourage Turkish people to donate blood and organs. Religious Affairs previously promoted organ donations with various different activities carried out in 2006 and 2007.

Religious Affairs decided to intensify its efforts to encourage Muslims to donate organs and blood in the upcoming 2008.

The circular sent to 81 regional religious offices said that the body after the donation was not damaged and buried according to the religious rituals.

The greatest obstacle to organ transplantations in the world is a shortness of cadaver-derived organs. In Turkey, the situation is more of an ‘organ craving’. Turkey, with its 67 million population, must find 1675 donors/year to reach the 25 cadaver donors per million people per year target set by Organ Transplantation Associations in its 1999 Rome meeting.

Total donor number, which was 49 in 1999, has reached only 100 in the year 2000. Cadaver rate per million population, which is 33.6 in Spain and 14.2 in Eurotransplant is 1.49 in Turkey for the year 2002. There are 23 renal, 13 liver and 11 heart transplantation centers active in Turkey. For the year 2002, 82% of donors were from hospitals practicing organ transplantation.

Only 22 hospitals from a grand total of 1159 in Turkey have yielded donors. University hospitals yielded 62% of the donors and two cities; Antalya and Izmir yielded 63%. There are seven hospitals in these two cities, two without organ transplantation units, serving to a population of 5 million.

There are trained organ transplantation coordinators in all these centers. We must increase the awareness in hospitals on the issue of organ transplantation and see to it that organ transplantation coordinator works actively to provide a sufficient number of organs from cadaver donors.

A previous survey on public attitudes toward organ donation in a Turkish community revealed that 16.1 percentage of those who surveyed refused to donate due to religious reasons.