ORGAN TRADERS: NEW TRENDS AND CHALLENGES

ORGAN TRADERS: NEW TRENDS AND CHALLENGES

 

courtesy BBC UK

Organ donation is a world wide issue which sees million of people annually awaiting for an organ.  Many people never get the chance, others get lucky.  Some resort to the illegal practice of 'buying' the organ.  

In most developed countries, such practice of using 'illegally' obtained organs is both forbidden and shunned by the medical community.

However, patients know that if they take sometimes huge risks and go abroad, their chances of obtaining an organ from a donor who has been payed, and sometimes not.  

The international black market for organs is growing at a brisk pace.  More poignantly, organ harvesting has grown from 'buying' the organ to in some cases murdering victims to harvest the organs sought.  

A new documentary seeks to shed light on the illegal harvesting of organs.  One of the most blatant cases was that of a hospital in Turkey, where a surgeon after his arrest confessed to having transplanted more than 4,000 organs.

The problem is that increasingly, the organs seem to come from sources where the 'donor' is not a live person, but someone who has been killed to harvest the organ, or has been kidnapped and his/her organ harvested before being dumped back to the streets.  In some cases the victims are children or youths in refugee camps, or from world slums.

The profits of such illegal trade are immense.  One organ harvested with payment, often of only a few hundred dollars, can be resold for sums of up to 1 million dollars.

More worryingly, the traffickers have found ways to smuggle illegal organ in countries where such practices are illegal and monitored.  One such case was that of a man found at an airport in Kosovo.  His stomach was found hastily sewn up from a recent organ removal.  When tracking the organ, it was found to have been used in a hospital in Israel.  By the time investigators tried to interrogate the 'donor', he had disappeared.

The documentary, People and Power, seeks to shed light on the practice and find solutions to stem it.  

Source: Al Jazeera