Organ Trafficking in Eastern Europe
By: Dr. Sam Vaknin
Also published by United Press International (UPI)
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November 13, 2002
Updated March 7, 2005
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.
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