BODY PARTS NEEDED Part Four

The first UK-wide multimedia organ donation campaign was rolled out only 18 months ago. Research reveals that 96% of UK residents would accept an organ if needed, however, only 27% have the joined the NHS Organ Donor Register (ODR) to date. If we would accept an organ, shouldn’t we be prepared to give one?

More transplants were carried out last year than ever before, but the need for organs never stops as more than 10,000 people in the UK currently need a transplant. Of these, over 1,000 – on average 3 a day – die every year before they receive an organ.

Nonetheless, only 3,500 transplants were carried out in the UK last year. Alongside these figures, however, are transplants performed privately, many of them overseas patients paying to get onto the waiting list for organs donated by British people. It emerged that more than 700 transplants, mostly liver transplants, had been carried out on non-UK patients over the past decade with most coming from countries such as Greece and Italy. Not known is the number of UK residents who traveled abroad for transplants; ‘transplant tourists’.

Leaders of the UK's main religions have joined in the appeal urging their followers to register as organ donors.  They are trying to counter uncertainty about what their religions teach about organ donation. The Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, the head of the Muslim Council of Britain and the Chief Rabbi are among those involved. BBC News Religious Affairs Correspondent Robert Pigott says senior clergy report that some people are unsure what their religion teaches about the subject.

The Church of England says organ donation is a Christian duty. The transplantation of human organs through a systematic organ donation process may well be a watershed in the relationship between science and Christian ethics.

Many however, do not share the Christian or altruistic viewpoint, especially overseas where many ask, "Why should we sign up as organ donors if our organs can and are being sold to the highest bidder?”  

In the UK someone tried to hawk their kidney on eBay, only to have it pulled by the site -- but not before the price reached epic heights. In 1999, before eBay delisted a kidney put up for auction, bidders drove the price up to $5.75 million. 

Cash-strapped Brits are charging up to £60,000 for this vital organ. Why the astronomical figure? Currently at least a million people worldwide need a kidney, and quickly; the key characteristics of marketing: PRODUCT, PRICE, PLACEMENT, PROMOTION.

Kidneys are particularly big on the black market. The World Health Organization provides this quick price comparison: 

KIDNEY

INDIA                                     $20.000.00 

CHINA                           40,000.00 

ISRAEL                         160,000.00 

(as in all sales and marketing enterprises the producer (organ donor) doesn’t collect all the money—there are several levels of fees that accompany illegal donation) 

“The person giving up the organ only gets a fraction of the fee,” says Sally Satel, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. After the organ broker—the guy who sets up your kidney-for-cash transaction—takes his cut, he needs to pay for travel, the surgeon, medical supplies and a few “look-the-other-way” payoffs. Most people get $1,000 to $10,000 for their kidney. 

It's illegal in the U.S., and most other nations, to offer or receive compensation for an organ donation. But a black market for human organs does exist. Citizens of impoverished nations or regions are often tempted to sell one of their kidneys on the black market. In some cases, these entrepreneurial donors are recruited (or learn through word-of-mouth and volunteer) and flown to another nation, where the organ is removed in a makeshift operating room.

In 2003, a slum resident’s organ was bought for $6,000.00, flown to South Africa where middlemen were then able to sell it for $100,000.00]. Villagers in a destitute part of India who sold their kidneys in a similar scheme received about $800 for their organs. At one time, Israeli organ brokers were obtaining kidneys from people in former Soviet-bloc nations and transplanting them into patients who traveled to Turkey for the operation. For the broker, there was money to be made -- one Israeli middleman in the organ trade made $4 million before being caught.

Last summer, a man offering one of his for $100,000 (plus medical expenses) on Craigslist received several offers until the Web site removed his post.

Italy, with its close proximity to the once war-torn Bosnia and Albania, used to be a gold mine for black market organs. Before a police sting in 1997, a private clinic in Trieste was making millions selling the organs of murdered Bosnian prisoners of war. 

Latin America has long been a hotbed for the organ theft trade. In El Salvador it is rumored that a whole child can be bought for $16,000 and harvested for organs. Corneas can be bought for just $6,000 in the alleys of Honduras. In Guatemala City stripping tissues from the deceased is one of the perks of being an undertaker. And in Colombia, where every body may be harvested for organs unless the family files special objections, organ theft is not even illegal. 

Closer to home the scene is a quiet hotel room in midtown Manhattan when two Chinese nationals are concluding a business deal to sell the kidneys, corneas, livers and lungs of executed Chinese prisoners for tens of thousands of dollars. 

No one, not even human-rights advocates, believes organs should never be harvested for humane medical purposes. Rather, the controversy arises, as it always does with transplants, over how those donations are solicited and under what circumstances they can be used. 

Wealthy foreigners willing to pay anywhere from $10,000 to $40,000 for a kidney operation.. "We estimate there are about 6,000 prisoners executed in China each year," says William Schulz, executive director of Amnesty International, U.S.A., "and about 90% of transplanted kidneys come from executed prisoners." 

Chinese doctors remove organs from executed prisoners before the "donor's" heart has stopped beating, according to congressional testimony by a Chinese physician who now lives in the United States. The organs are harvested to profit from demand for the part by foreign organ-transplant patients. It's estimated that China conducts around 3,000 executions per year, so you're talking a multimillion-dollar business when you consider a selling price of as much as $30,000 for a heart or kidney. 

Like any business, it comes down to simple supply and demand.  And euthanasia seems a likely step in the supply chain for those who can afford it. The illegal sale of human body parts is big business, and an expansion in the euthanasia business will undoubtedly add to this already widespread global racket.

According to reports by U.S. insurance companies and hospitals, the going rate for a lung is $116,400, a kidney $91,400 and a heart $57,000 – making a human body one of the most lucrative thefts around. In fact when googling for ‘body parts’, human spare part sites now outnumber those selling auto parts.

Although illegal body part sales are often linked to third world countries and those where human life holds little intrinsic value organ transplant criminal cases are slowly spreading across the United States.  A doctor in a north California Regional Medical Center was charged by Los Angeles police with giving drugs to a comatose 26-year-old man to hasten his death for a transplant team. The man didn’t die after being taken off a life support machine and police charged the doctor with hurrying his death.

To thwart body snatchers at the University of California, a major destination for organs and cadavers donated to science, they are considering inserting super-market style bar codes or radio frequency chips into corpses to make sure they are not nabbed by body snatchers.

Indian police said stolen kidneys are being sold for between $6,000 to $10,000. Many Indian doctors make less than $10,000 in a whole year so the temptation to steal organs is high.

Near New Deli, three leading Indian transplant surgeons, the owner of the Noida Medicare Centre, a hospital famed for transplants, and six others were arrested after Shaukat Ali, a mechanic, complained he'd been drugged and robbed of a kidney during a routine medical examination. Two similar accusations had already been filed against the centre including the theft of a kidney belonging to a mentally retarded child. Police say that hundreds of poor Indians disappear every day in New Deli alone. Human rights activists wonder how many were murdered for their organs.

In a German controversy involving autopsy, human body parts are smuggled out of hospital basements by shady hospital workers and sold to local drug companies for the extraction of growth hormones.  The list of items on drug companies's plan does not stop there.  In an investigative report by Der Spiegel, a liberal German newsmagazine, drug companies also buy meninges --the membranes that surround the brain and spinal cord -- by tens of thousands. 

In Russia bodies of the dead are automatically owned by the government and must be turned over immediately to authorities. Horribly gruesome pictures have surfaced showing tables full of stacked nude bodies of men, women and children with long incisions showing they had been harvested for body parts.

Russian academician warn that euthanasia in Russia will become a legal way to seize human organs; the risk of criminal seizure of human organs sharply increases, Russian Academy of Medical Sciences academician Sergey Kolesnikov (United Russia) told a REGNUM correspondent commenting on Senator Valentina Petrenko’s initiative to draft such a law… it will become one of legal ways to seize property of an individual, depending on how the procedure is stated by the law,” Kolesnikov believes. “It is no secret that there is a practice of signing contracts with elderly people on using their organs after their death. In this case it would be legal,” he said.

Italy, with its close proximity to the once war-torn Bosnia and Albania, used to be a gold mine for black market organs. Before a police sting in 1997, a private clinic in Trieste was making millions selling the organs of murdered Bosnian prisoners of war.

Latin America has long been a hotbed for the organ theft trade. In El Salvador it is rumored that a whole child can be bought for $16,000 and harvested for organs. Corneas can be bought for just $6,000 in the alleys of Honduras. In Guatemala City stripping tissues from the deceased is one of the perks of being an undertaker. And in Colombia, where every body may be harvested for organs unless the family files special objections, organ theft is not even illegal.

Although transplant surgery is saving lives, at the same time, it has created a trade in human body parts.  The inevitable result is a booming international black market of body parts that caters to rich recipients and destitute (and sometimes helpless) donors

Ethicists say that turning donations into transactions diminishes the human element. "Some, in their religious or cultural views, regard as sacred or holy things that we say `aren't for sale.' For example, our own moral integrity, it's not for sale."

Questions about the underground world of organ trafficking were thrust into the open after the Star discovered that a man accused of being the mastermind behind an alleged, massive black-market trade in kidneys was living in Toronto.

In ethics literature some have argued that the creation of a market in which people are free to sell their organs – as long as they're not coerced to do so – could go far in reducing the tortuous reality of years-long waiting lists for transplants. However, some of those selling their organs are some of the poorest people on the planet. Can they really be making an autonomous choice that by not selling the kidney they can't buy food to eat? It's really not a free choice, a necessary component in making a moral choice, along with having alternate choices and knowing consequences.

In the West, a wealthy person needing a kidney can order a trip from a "medical tourism" company to a place where rules are lax, such as the Philippines, to get a transplant for about $80,000. One website allows customers to add the transplant to the online "shopping cart," as you would add a book on Amazon.com before paying with your credit card.