Sixteen people are currently listed as living donors with the Transplant Support Group, which means they are willing to donate an organ during their lifetime.

Alfred Debattista, from the organisation, said they included people who wanted to donate organs to relatives and those were willing to help strangers, known as Samaritan donors.

Living donors mainly give one of their kidneys but they can also donate bone marrow, cells, body tissue and blood.

Unless a living donor is a relative or close friend of a patient in need of a transplant, they cannot pick who to donate to, Mr Debattista said.

This issue was raised last year when a woman placed an advert asking for a kidney for her son’s father. The woman, Sarah Borg, offered €5,000 to cover medical and other expenses incurred, stressing she was not trying to buy an organ.

Mater Dei Hospital’s Live Organ Transplant Advisory Committee held an urgent meeting to decide whether to allow 20 donors – who had offered to donate their kidney to the man – to go ahead with the screening process.

The committee decided this would go against the principle of “distributive justice” adopted when people, who are complete strangers to the patient, offer to be donors.

Mr Debattista said yesterday that the number of living donors might be higher than the 16 registered ones, since they were not obliged to register with the support group.

He said the group was working hard to encourage people to register themselves as living donors and also to get a donor card allowing their organs to help other people once they died. Each year about 2,000 register for the donor card, he said.

Despite the goodwill, there were 121 people waiting for a transplant in Malta – the majority of them renal patients in need of a kidney.

Organ donation is complex. Donors have to be compatible and, in the case of living donors, healthy enough to undergo the serious operation, he said.

A Health Ministry spokesman said 80 people need a kidney transplant, with a waiting time of between one and four years.

Some 30 people need a cornea, with a waiting time of between six months and a year, while five patients need a liver, four a heart and two a lung.

Speaking in Parliament last month, Health Minister Godfrey Farrugia said problems with organ donations arose because some potential donors could not help because they were elderly or had suffered medical conditions.