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    HomeNewsIndiaCo-WIN to be used for making organ donation transparent, connect blood donors: Govt official

    Co-WIN to be used for making organ donation transparent, connect blood donors: Govt official

    A top government official said on Friday that India's Covid vaccination platform Co-WIN will be re-purposed as an organ donation platform to make the current system more transparent and to link patients with suitable donors in their area.

    PTI
    June 17, 2022 / 20:54 IST
    Source: Shutterstock

    India's Covid vaccination platform Co-WIN will be repurposed as an organ donation platform for making the present system transparent and also for connecting patients with suitable blood donors around their location, a top government official said here on Friday.

    Speaking at Vivatech 2022, Co-WIN chief and CEO of the National Health Authority R S Sharma said that the platform will be used for various use cases in the health sector domain like immunisation programme, blood donation, organ donation and Ayushman Bharat Digital mission. "Nobody knows if there is any person nearby who can donate the blood or a nearby blood bank which has this (blood group as required) kind of blood. We will put everybody on this (blood donation) platform which can become an extremely dynamic blood donation platform. Like (in case of) Covid you can see which vaccines are available, for blood also you can see which donors are available nearby," Sharma said.

    The Co-WIN platform at present only focused on COVID-19 vaccination programme and facilitating information and documents related to it. Sharma said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi is very keen on using the Co-WIN platform for organ donation.

    "Organ donation is in a pitiable situation, I must admit in India, where there is a lot of non-transparency in the whole system. We can make the entire system transparent," Sharma said. He said that the Co-WIN portal will be used for national digital health missions.

    "The essential idea is that we should use learning from these platforms to deliver more and more health services," Sharma said. The Co-WIN platform is being made ready for alerting parents of children about their vaccination programme.

    COVID-19 Vaccine

    Frequently Asked Questions

    View more
    How does a vaccine work?

    A vaccine works by mimicking a natural infection. A vaccine not only induces immune response to protect people from any future COVID-19 infection, but also helps quickly build herd immunity to put an end to the pandemic. Herd immunity occurs when a sufficient percentage of a population becomes immune to a disease, making the spread of disease from person to person unlikely. The good news is that SARS-CoV-2 virus has been fairly stable, which increases the viability of a vaccine.

    How many types of vaccines are there?

    There are broadly four types of vaccine — one, a vaccine based on the whole virus (this could be either inactivated, or an attenuated [weakened] virus vaccine); two, a non-replicating viral vector vaccine that uses a benign virus as vector that carries the antigen of SARS-CoV; three, nucleic-acid vaccines that have genetic material like DNA and RNA of antigens like spike protein given to a person, helping human cells decode genetic material and produce the vaccine; and four, protein subunit vaccine wherein the recombinant proteins of SARS-COV-2 along with an adjuvant (booster) is given as a vaccine.

    What does it take to develop a vaccine of this kind?

    Vaccine development is a long, complex process. Unlike drugs that are given to people with a diseased, vaccines are given to healthy people and also vulnerable sections such as children, pregnant women and the elderly. So rigorous tests are compulsory. History says that the fastest time it took to develop a vaccine is five years, but it usually takes double or sometimes triple that time.

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    He said that the PM wants to make Co-WIN platform technology an open platform because it is a tool for digital public good. "We are now giving it as a digital public good free of cost to any country who wants it," Sharma said.

    He said that over 130 countries are in discussion with India for learning and adopting Co-WIN platform technology.

    PTI
    first published: Jun 17, 2022 08:54 pm

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