A kidney fetches $2700 in Turkey. According to the
October 2002 issue of the Journal of the American
Medical Association, this is a high price. An Indian or
Iraqi kidney enriches its former owner by a mere $1000.
Wealthy clients later pay for the rare organ up to
$150,000.
CBS News aired, five years ago, a documentary, filmed
by Antenna 3 of Spain, in which undercover reporters in
Mexico were asked, by a priest acting as a middleman for
a doctor, to pay close to 1 million dollars for a single
kidney. An auction of a human kidney on eBay in
February 2000 drew a bid of $100,000 before the
company put a stop to it. Another auction in September
1999 drew $5.7 million - though, probably, merely as a
prank.
Organ harvesting operations flourish in Turkey, in central
Europe, mainly in the Czech Republic, and in the
Caucasus, mainly in Georgia. They operate on Turkish,
Moldovan, Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Romanian,
Bosnian, Kosovar, Macedonian, Albanian and assorted
east European donors.
They remove kidneys, lungs, pieces of liver, even corneas,
bones, tendons, heart valves, skin and other sellable
human bits. The organs are kept in cold storage and air
lifted to illegal distribution centers in the United States,
Germany, Scandinavia, the United Kingdom, Israel, South
Africa, and other rich, industrialized locales. It gives
"brain drain" a new, spine chilling, meaning.
Organ trafficking has become an international trade. It
involves Indian, Thai, Philippine, Brazilian, Turkish and
Israeli doctors who scour the Balkan and other destitute
regions for tissues. The Washington Post reported, in
November 2002, that in a single village in Moldova, 14
out of 40 men were reduced by penury to selling body
parts.
Four years ago, Moldova cut off the thriving baby
adoption trade due to an - an unfounded - fear the toddlers
were being dissected for spare organs. According to the
Israeli daily, Ha'aretz, the Romanians are investigating
similar allegations in Israel and have withheld permission
to adopt Romanian babies from dozens of eager and out of
pocket couples. American authorities are scrutinizing a
two year old Moldovan harvesting operation based in the
United States.
Organ theft and trading in Ukraine is a smooth operation.
According to news agencies, in August 2002, three
Ukrainian doctors were charged in Lvov with trafficking
in the organs of victims of road accidents. The doctors
used helicopters to ferry kidneys and livers to colluding
hospitals. They charged up to $19,000 per organ.
The West Australian daily surveyed in January 2002 the
thriving organs business in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Sellers
are offering their wares openly, through newspaper ads.
Prices reach up to $68,000. Compared to an average
monthly wage of less than $200, this is an unimaginable
fortune.
National health insurance schemes turn a blind eye.
Israel's participates in the costs of purchasing organs
abroad, though only subject to rigorous vetting of the
sources of the donation. Still, a May 2001 article in a the
New York Times Magazine, quotes "the coordinator of
kidney transplantation at Hadassah University Hospital in
Jerusalem (as saying that) 60 of the 244 patients currently
receiving post-transplant care purchased their new kidney
from a stranger - just short of 25 percent of the patients at
one of Israel's largest medical centers participating in the
organ business".
Many Israelis - attempting to avoid scrutiny - travel to
east Europe, accompanied by Israeli doctors, to perform
the transplantation surgery. These junkets are
euphemistically known as "transplant tourism". Clinics
have sprouted all over the benighted region. Israeli
doctors have recently visited impoverished Macedonia,
Bulgaria, Kosovo and Yugoslavia to discuss with local
businessmen and doctors the setting up of kidney
transplant clinics.
Such open involvement in what can be charitably
described as a latter day slave trade gives rise to a new
wave of thinly disguised anti-Semitism. The Ukrainian
Echo, quoting the Ukrinform news agency, reported, on
January 7, 2002, that, implausibly, a Ukrainian guest
worker died in Tel-Aviv in mysterious circumstances and
his heart was removed. The Interpol, according to the
paper, is investigating this lurid affair.
According to scholars, reports of organ thefts and related
abductions, mainly of children, have been rife in Poland
and Russia at least since 1991. The buyers are supposed to
be rich Arabs.
Nancy Scheper-Hughes, an anthropologist at the
University of California at Berkeley and co-founder of
Organs Watch, a research and documentation center, is
also a member and co-author of the Bellagio Task Force
Report on Transplantation, Bodily Integrity and the
International Traffic in Organs. In a report presented in
June 2001 to the House Subcommittee on International
Operations and Human Rights, she substantiated at least
the nationality of the alleged buyers, though not the urban
legends regarding organ theft:
"In the Middle East residents of the Gulf States (Kuwait,
Saudi Arabia, and Oman) have for many years traveled to
India, the Philippines, and to Eastern Europe to purchase
kidneys made scarce locally due to local fundamentalist
Islamic teachings that allow organ transplantation (to save
a life), but prohibit organ harvesting from brain-dead
bodies.
Meanwhile, hundreds of kidney patients from Israel,
which has its own well -developed, but under-used
transplantation centers (due to ultra-orthodox Jewish
reservations about brain death) travel in 'transplant tourist'
junkets to Turkey, Moldova, Romania where desperate
kidney sellers can be found, and to Russia where an
excess of lucrative cadaveric organs are produced due to
lax standards for designating brain death, and to South
Africa where the amenities in transplantation clinics in
private hospitals can resemble four star hotels.
We found in many countries - from Brazil and Argentina
to India, Russia, Romania, Turkey to South Africa and
parts of the United States - a kind of 'apartheid medicine'
that divides the world into two distinctly different
populations of 'organs supplies' and 'organs receivers'."
Russia, together with Estonia, China and Iraq, is, indeed, a
major harvesting and trading centre. International news
agencies described, five years ago, how a grandmother in
Ryazan tried to sell her grandchild to a mediator. The boy
was to be smuggled to the West and there dismembered
for his organs. The uncle, who assisted in the matter, was
supposed to collect $70,000 - a fortune in Russian terms.
When confronted by the European Union on this issue,
Russia responded that it lacks the resources required to
monitor organ donations. The Italian magazine, Happy
Web, reports that organ trading has taken to the Internet.
A simple query on the Google search engine yields
thousands of Web sites purporting to sell various body
parts - mostly kidneys - for up to $125,000. The sellers are
Russian, Moldovan, Ukrainian and Romanian.
Scheper-Hughes, an avid opponent of legalizing any form
of trade in organs, says that "in general, the movement
and flow of living donor organs - mostly kidneys - is from
South to North, from poor to rich, from black and brown
to white, and from female to male bodies".
Yet, in the summer of 2002, bowing to reality, the
American Medical Association commissioned a study to
examine the effects of paying for cadaveric organs would
have on the current shortage. The 1984 National Organ
Transplant Act that forbids such payments is also under
attack. Bills to amend it were submitted recently by
several Congressmen. These are steps in the right
direction.
Organ trafficking is the outcome of the international ban
on organ sales and live donor organs. But wherever there
is demand there is a market. Excruciating poverty of
potential donors, lengthening patient waiting lists and the
better quality of organs harvested from live people make
organ sales an irresistible proposition. The medical
professions and authorities everywhere would do better to
legalize and regulate the trade rather than transform it into
a form of organized crime. The denizens of Moldova
would surely appreciate it.