BROTHERS Tony and Alan Morgan are on opposite sides of the organ transplant divide.

While Tony, 68, needs a new kidney to free him from the thrice-weekly demands of the dialysis that keeps him going, 66-year-old Alan continues to benefit from the donor kidney he received more than four years ago.

As a former chauffeur, Pontypool-born Tony, who lives in rural Monmouthshire, near Abergavenny, was used to covering hundreds of miles a week between South Wales and London whilst working for peers and company directors.

But now his biggest journeys are those making up the 180 miles a week he must travel by ambulance car to Cardiff and back for his vital treatment.

Tony is one of almost 500 people in Wales awaiting an organ transplant, though almost a quarter of these are currently suspended from the list, mainly due to illness.

He has been receiving dialysis three times a week for more than 18 months, and has been on the transplant waiting list for a year.

"I started on four hours of dialysis each session, but they've put me up to four-and-a-half," said Tony, who over a 40-year career had Tom Jones, Shirley Bassey and Sir Anthony Hopkins among his passengers - the latter in disguise following a post-Silence Of The Lambs media storm, and whom he delivered from the clutches of the paparazzi by losing them in the backstreets of Cardiff.

"The dialysis takes a lot out of the day, what with the travelling, but without it I don't know where I'd be. I've been diabetic for a long time and my kidneys gradually got worse.

"I was getting really tired and could not think of a reason why, then they found my kidneys weren't working anywhere near properly. Last time they checked they were working at seven per cent of what they should be."

For Alan Morgan, who lives in Pontypool, years of living with high blood pressure also resulted in deteriorating kidneys, and he too was a three-times-a-week dialysis patient before his transplant.

"I'd been getting weaker for years, and was in a poor state, but I was lucky because I wasn't on dialysis a year before I had my transplant," he said.

"I remember I was woken up at 6am because they had found a match for me and I had to go into hospital. "That is what it's like - you don't know how long you'll have to wait, whether they will find a match, what you'll be doing when you're called. But it's been a lifesaver."

There have been 431 kidney transplants to patients in Wales in the past four years - and two so far this year - through dead and live donors, from a total of 643 organ transplants.

According to other figures from the charity Kidney Wales Foundation, more than 816,000 people in Wales, or just over a quarter, are on the UK Donor Register.

But the need for more organs for transplant continues to grow, and each year many people die waiting for a donor organ.

Since 2005/06, 119 people in Wales have died whilst on the transplant list, 82 of whom have been kidney patients.

But the issue of organ donation continues to be debated, the key discussion currently being over whether or not to introduce in the UK a system of presumed consent, which would enable suitable organs to be harvested in the event of a person's death unless they had previously indicated they did not wish this to happen.

Presumed consent, in operation in some European countries, would reverse the current system in the UK.

Further information on organ donation can be found at www.kidneywales.com and www.uktransplant.org.uk