MANILA: The Philippines has broken India’s record of gathering the most organ donor pledges in an hour at a single site, health officials said Friday. The feat awaits the Guinness World Records’ official confirmation.

Thousands of people in the Philippines pledged to donate kidneys and other body parts after death as part of a bid to set a world record for organ donations, the Health Ministry said.

Health Assistant Secretary Eric Tayag said the campaign gathered 3,548 pledges at an event held at the Polytechnic University of the Philippines’ Manila campus, beating India’s previous record of 2,755.

“If they meet an unfortunate accident and they are brought to a hospital and declared brain dead... then doctors will know what to harvest,” Tayag told AFP.

A “record” 3,548 people signed up for organ donor cards at one Manila university in the space of an hour in the campaign launched by the ministry, he added.

This overtook India’s one-hour record of 2,755, set in Gujarat in September last year for a Guinness World Record, Tayag said.

At the event, aimed at raising awareness about organ donation, volunteers filled out forms with a checklist of organs they are willing to donate upon death. Those forms were then checked and recorded by organizers.

“We have a lot of countrymen who are in dire need of organs and this is part of the goal of the Department of Health to remove the stigma attached to donating organs,” Tayag said.

He said the record was still unofficial because there were no Guinness adjudicators present. Documented results will be sent to the records body.

The Philippines also hopes to top India’s record of 10,450 pledges in a single site in eight hours, and to set new records for the most number of donors signing up in one hour and eight hours in multiple sites.

Aside from Manila, simultaneous registration of donors was held in five other cities.

The results for the other record attempts were not yet available.

Guinness did not immediately certify the Manila donations.

The Philippine effort however failed to surpass India’s eight-hour world record of 10,450 people set in Haryana in December last year, Tayag said.

People signed up in six locations around the Philippines today as part of the world record bid, the official said.

Each will receive an organ donor card that they can put in their wallets, which specifies what organs can be harvested, said Tayag.

The event was also intended to spread awareness and remove the stigma in the Philippines about organ donation, he added.

Organ transplants are a controversial issue in the Philippines with poor people sometimes selling their kidneys and other organs to wealthy foreigners in the guise of “donations”.

The government banned most transplants of Filipino kidneys to foreigners in 2008, but critics say it is still going on in secret.