A delegation from Croatia attended a jubilee conference that attracted more than 400 experts from around the world to mark the anniversary.
King Willem-Alexender attended the conference and Croatia's Health Minister Milan Kujundzic was a special guest. He gave a lecture on Croatia's achievements in transplants, underscoring that Croatia was a global leader for organ donors and transplants.
"Croatia is truly a star here today and we need to thank two groups, one is those who are no longer with us, who donated their organs or rather their relatives agreed to donate their organs, and the other group is a great team of people who perform transplant surgery and who have truly performed a miracle," Minister Kujundzic said.
Dutch immunologist Jon J van Rood founded Eurotransplant in 1967 as a non-profit organisation that acts as a mediator between donors and recipients of organs for transplantation.
Until the mid-1960s transplant surgeons matched kidney donors and patients mainly by blood type. Patients had to wait until a suitable donor was found in the centre where they were treated.
Van Rood obtained evidence that the HLA (Human Leucocyte Antigen) system plays an import role in the outcome of renal transplantation. Matching of the HLA-type of donor and recipients led to superior graft and patient survival. However, the number of HLA antigens was large, which made the probability of finding a donor with a matching tissue type for a particular patient low. This probability will increase if a donor is offered to a central database of many patients in need for a transplant.
For this reason, Van Rood founded Eurotransplant, which by the early 1970s included six member countries - Austria, Belgium, Luxembourg, West Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland. Later Switzerland withdrew from the organisation and Slovenia joined, followed by Croatia and Hungary.
Over the past ten years, since joining the organisation in 2007, Croatia has become the most successful member of that organisation and a global leader in organ donations. Croatia transplants 35-40 organs per one million residents a year.
The first kidney transplant in Croatia was performed in 1971.