Govt hospital refutes allegations on UK girl's organs

The government hospital here today refuted allegations of any misuse of the organs, extracted during the autopsy of an eight-year-old British girl of Indian origin, who died in private hospital in Khanna last month.
The head of Government Rajindra Hospital's pathology department Dr Manjeet Singh Bal, who conducted viscera examination of the girl, outrightly denied such allegations.
The viscera, heart, lungs, piece of liver and brain were received in this department for pathological examination, he said.
Regarding allegations of girl's parents of organ harvesting and later Birmingham labour councillor Narinder Kaur Kooner's similar apprehensions, Bal said that "due to the international protocol in an autopsy we have to extract the organs for pathological examination as we have seen it recently seen in (Indian prisoner) Sarabjit Singh's case whose postmortem was conducted in Pakistan."

He added that the organs of the child are with the pathology department of the Patiala hospital as was mentioned in postmortem report.
"Hence there is not at all any possibility of any organ harvesting," he stressed.

He refuted the allegations that the extracted organs could have been misused.
Bal added that there are no transplantation centers for liver, heart and brain in Punjab.
"Only renal transplantation is being conducted in Ludhiana, Jalandhar, Mohali and Chandigarh for which the donor and recipient are kept in the same operation theatre that too after an exhaustive matching tests and investigations for months together. Moreover, any organ of an 8 year old child is not suitable for transplantation," he said.

He also said that no one from the family had approached them nor had they received any request for returning of organs.
"If they (the family) wanted to get back the organs they must have known the process and they should have come through proper channel... The organs have no use for the medical college and hospital," he added.
The girl had died at Khanna and postmortem examination was conducted by board of doctors of Government Rajindra Hospital, Patiala, four days after her death on April 6.