Desperation fuels organ black market for illegal transplants

Scotsman
Posted : 2007-08-06

PAUL Lee got his liver from an executed Chinese prisoner; Karam in Egypt bought a kidney for his sister for £2,600; in Istanbul Hakan is holding out for £15,200 for one of his kidneys.

They are not so unusual: recent figures from the World Health Organisation show a serious shortage of donated organs in richer countries is sending foreigners with end-stage illnesses to poorer places like China, Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, Colombia and the Philippines to buy a new lease of life.

Lee, a 53-year-old technician in Hong Kong, was diagnosed with liver cancer in January 2005 but doctors denied him a transplant because they feared the tumour would spread.

A friend told him about a hospital in China. He signed up and paid 260,000 yuan (£16,900) for a transplant - surgery that saved his life.

"The hospital has connections with a lot of prisons," Lee said. "Mine came from an executed prisoner from Heilongjiang. I thank the donor deeply."

The World Health Organisation estimates that 21,000 liver transplants are carried out annually, but medical experts put annual worldwide demand at least 90,000.

Demand for kidneys also exceeds supply, and that has given rise to organ trafficking and a black market for rich people and "transplant tourists" who travel to poor countries to buy body parts from people with limited routes to a better living.

A donor in South Africa receives £344 for a kidney compared with £14,766 in the United States. Such transactions are illegal in the UK.

In the transplant trade, the recipient need not worry about, for example, exposing a living relative to that risk.

"It is cheaper and your next of kin is not taking the risk and you don't have to care for someone you don't know," said Luc Noel, a Geneva-based co-ordinator for Clinical Procedures at the World Health Organisation.

China recently banned the sale of human organs and restricted transplants for foreigners, saying it must first meet demand at home for two million organs a year.

Pakistan, where trade in human organs is not illegal, is turning into a "kidney bazaar", said the chief executive of Pakistan's Kidney Foundation, Jaffar Naqvi.

In Lahore alone there are 13 centres which reported more than 2,000 transplants last year.

Patients, mostly from Europe, Saudi Arabia and India, pay about 500,000 rupees (£4,183) for a new kidney, he said.

Donors are paid £150 to £500 and often get no medical care after the surgery.

There is no consent in some cases. In May police arrested nine people, four of them doctors, for abducting people, drugging them and stealing their kidneys for transplant operations.

Stories of people selling their organs, especially kidneys, are not uncommon in Egypt, where more than 30 per cent of a population of more than 73 million people live below the poverty line.

In Turkey, students, unemployed young men and struggling fathers post adverts on the internet to sell their kidneys, listing their drinking and smoking habits and blood type.

I3nquiries from Germany, Israel and Turkey can realise a price of up to 50,000 lira (£19,000).

Hakan, 27, a security guard with two young children said he received five or six offers from Turkey and Germany, offering 10,000-15,000 lira, but he's holding out for 40,000 lira (£15,200).

"Of course it's frightening but there's nothing else to be done," he said, adding he hadn't told his wife as he knew she would object.

"I'm doing it because of my family, if I was alone it wouldn't matter. I've got two children... there's nothing else I can do for them."