Desperate Americans Buy Kidneys From Peru Poor in Fatal Trade

[sharingwisdom]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-...tal-trade.html

excerpt

Every year, about 5,000 gravely ill people from countries including the U.S., Israel and Saudi Arabia pay others to donate an organ, says Francis Delmonico, a Harvard Medical School professor and surgeon. The practice is illegal in every country except Iran, Delmonico says.

Affluent, often desperately ill patients travel to countries such as Egypt, Peru and the Philippines, where poor people sell them their organs. In Latin America, the transplants are usually arranged by unlicensed brokers. They’re performed -- for fees -- by accredited surgeons, some of whom have trained at the world’s leading medical schools.

The global demand for organs far exceeds the available supply.

Americans who go abroad for illicit transplants can contract infections or HIV from unhealthy donors, posing a public health threat when they return…

“With all the anxiety in getting a transplant, they exploit the patient,” says Delmonico, who is president-elect of the Montreal-based Transplantation Society, which lobbies governments to crack down on trafficking. “It’s big money.”

In the illegal organ trade, brokers scour the world’s slums, preying on the poor with promises of easy money and little risk in exchange for a kidney. Inside hospitals, people are injured or killed by botched surgery as doctors place money above ethics, criminal investigators say.

The poor have become a spare-parts bank for the well-to- do,” says University of California, Berkeley, anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes, who specializes in organ trafficking.

[Makes the movie, "Never Let Me Go" about organically reared childrenfarmed for their organs not so far off]