Need a new kidney? Liver? Heart?
If you can type Chinese and find the right keywords, boom – thousands of hits pop up on the Internet.
According to the United Network for Organ Sharing, more than 28,000 Americans received organ transplants in 2005. However, more than 90,000 desperate people remain on the waiting list.
What takes most Americans three to five years, you can get across the Pacific within weeks. It doesn’t matter what you’re looking for, the ground rules are: don’t ask where the organ came from, just show me the money!
When the option of trading an entire faulty organ for a healthy one became an accepted procedure in the 1990s, people were lured, said Dr. William H. Marks, director of Swedish Medical Center.
“To seek organs elsewhere became an option, although we in the U.S. and most of the world consider organ trafficking unethical and illegal,” he said.
In a market where demand is high and supply is scarce, the deal sounds tempting. You might not pay less, but when it’s your life or a loved one’s on the line, time equals money.
For this reason, an increasing number of westerners have looked to China for new body parts. The average wait for a kidney is one to three months, according to the China International Organ Transplant Center.
But the question is: Why can hospitals in some countries guarantee that every patient will receive the organ they ask for, within months, while the rest of the world lacks donors?
A 1994 Human Rights Watch report described evidence that executed prisoners are the principal source of body organs for medical transplantation purposes in China.
Although some argue that it’s acceptable for condemned criminals to help save lives, the report stated that China’s heavy reliance on prisoners as an organ source is a serious human rights violation.
I called one of the Chinese transplant centers and asked for a kidney.
“I don’t know whether the donors are dead or alive when their organs are removed. That’s not something under my control,” a staff member said. “All you need to know is you will have the organ you want with a good quality.”
The consent forms of prisoners are usually missing, according to the 2006 “Report into Allegations of Organ Harvesting of Falun Practitioners in China,” by Canadian human rights attorney David Matas and former Canadian Minister of State David Kilgour.
The Chinese government claimed that most organs come from volunteers who died of natural causes. However, among the 40,393 transplant surgeries performed between 1971 and 2001, only 227 organs came from donations, the report stated.
In Chinese culture, preserving the dead is a way to show respect. Finding donors is extremely difficult, said Erping Zhang, a spokesperson of Falun-Gong, an outlawed Chinese spiritual-practice group. They claim their members are illegally executed for their organs.
People from impoverished areas have always sold their body parts for profit, but using prisoners’ organs without consent is a different story.
When I was growing up in Taiwan, I heard stories about people selling blood for money there and in China. Now I see people selling their own corneas online.
Advances in technology have not only created new medical techniques, but also have whetted the “body Mafia’s” appetite (doctors, demagogues or law enforcement officers).
People should also consider the possible health risk of getting their organs overseas.
“We see a lot of people returning from overseas requiring care,” said Dr. Connie Davis, medical director of the kidney and pancreas transplant program at the University of Washington Medical Center. Infectious diseases like HIV and AIDS can be transmitted.
Doctors face an ethical dilemma.
Many, such as Marks, believe buying organs without consent is a degrading act that supports unethical organ trafficking.
Two values are at stake.
“On one side, if you don’t take care of patients who come back, there is a chance that they become ill and again become the burden of our system here,” Marks said. “On the other hand … do you ignore the human sacrifice made when you find another person who benefits … is his action reprehensible?”
Davis said doctors are torn by ethical questions. However, she said, it is a doctor’s obligation to take care of patients even when they disagree with their actions.
Although the transplant community is highly aware of the issue, the majority of the public pays little attention unless they become personally involved.
No one has the answer. I wonder what I will see available online after another decade.
Tieh-Pai Chen spent the summer as a reporting intern at The Herald after earning a bachelor’s degree in print journalism from Central Washington University.
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