Calgary Firm Brokering Organs from China

[Curiosity]

Transplants - a great miracle for many - a horror for some http://www.freedominion.ca/phpBB2/posting.php?mode=quote&p=931276 http://www.canada.com/topics/news/story.html?id=4580d84f-0613-4521-a906-4bc6b898a02d&k=79553

Calgary firm under fire for brokering organ transplants in China
Michelle Lang
CanWest News Service; Calgary Herald
Wednesday, March 07, 2007

CALGARY - A Calgary business is under fire for helping North Americans who need new organs acquire livers and lungs from China, with critics claiming the country executes prisoners to supply a burgeoning transplant industry.
Calgary-based Overseas Medical Services assists patients with purchasing organ transplants for $120,000 US, facilitating four transplant surgeries recently for Americans who faced lengthy wait lists at home. Several Canadian patients have also expressed interest in the service.
Aruna Thurairajan, owner of Overseas Medical Services, and her clients insist the Chinese organs come from consenting donors.
"The people who talk about the ethical problems aren't the ones walking in the shoes of the patient," said Thurairajan, a former Sri Lankan medical administrator. "There's no reason we should stop this. We should promote it," she added.
But human rights advocates say Ottawa and the provinces should enact laws stopping Canadians from participating in the international organ trade, arguing the industry has troubling practices.
In January, Winnipeg lawyer David Matas and former Liberal MP David Kilgour released a report alleging China is harvesting organs taken without consent from executed prisoners, mainly Falun Gong practitioners.
"We should be prohibiting this sort of traffic," said Matas in an interview from Dublin, where he was presenting results of his report. "We need our laws to be extraterritorial so they apply when the transplant is abroad."
Matas' report implicates the Chinese military in the harvesting of the organs. It also claimed that some Canadians had travelled to China to purchase organs.
Groups like Human Rights Watch have also voiced concerns over the Chinese transplant industry. Some family members of executed prisoners have said they didn't give consent to donate their organs, according to the New York-based advocacy group.
China denies the allegations. A recent statement from the Chinese Embassy in Ottawa said Matas' report is based on rumours, calling it "biased and groundless."
Overseas Medical Services made headlines itself last spring when the company began brokering $30,000 US kidney transplants in Pakistan from live donors willing to sell one of their kidneys.
Thurairajan said she has since expanded her business to China because there are a wider variety of organs available for sale, including livers, lungs and hearts.
In the past six months, Thurairajan - who receives a payment worth 10 per cent of the surgery for her services - has arranged for three clients to have liver transplants and one to undergo a lung transplant.
She said the transplant industry is tightly regulated in China and entirely "above board."
About 4,000 patients in this country were waiting for organ transplants in 2006, according to the Canadian Institute for Health Information.
_________________

 

[Sparrow]

This business would be less lucrative if everyone signed up to be organ donors. I don't know why people won't do it, we don't need our organs after we are dead. Imagine if just 1% of everyone who died in Canada last year had donated their organs we probably would not have to look outside of the country. When I die if anyone need a part of me it will be my honor to donate whatever I can!

 

[L Gilbert]

Geeeeeee. Lots of people talking about allegations of this, suspicions of that .... no-one can find out for sure? Stupid to act on suspicions. Even stupider to start suspicions without evidence. Highly unreasonable, unscientific, and emotional.

 

[Curiosity]

The brokering has been going on for years and has been discussed publicly for as long... and nobody seems to want to do anything about it.


http://www.forbes.com/free_forbes/2007/0129/072.html

Desperate Arrangements - Forbes Magazine
Richard C. Morais 01.29.07

The demand for transplants can't be met by altruistic organ banks, so Internet brokers are stepping into the breach. It's not a pretty picture.
From his modest ranch home in the hills of Sun Valley, Calif., filled with didgeridoos picked up in Australia and German shepherd puppies, James Cohan, 66, sells organ transplant brokering services to the desperate. His customers face certain death if their diseased organs aren't quickly swapped out. They find him on the Internet; his stated fee--$140,000 for a kidney and $290,000 for a heart, liver or lung--includes hospital and surgeon charges, and flights and accommodation for a fellow traveler, such as a nurse or spouse.
Cohan's sales pitch: The quality of the organ is more important than the choice of the doctor performing the transplant, and I know how to get you a fresh organ--quickly--if you've got the money. "If you keep putting a broken engine into your car, you're going to keep on having the same problem, no matter how good the mechanic is," he says.
Cohan spent several months in an Italian jail in the late 1990s on ultimately unsubstantiated allegations that he was buying and selling organs. What he is doing, he says, is entirely legal; he does not buy or sell organs but merely brings clients to hospitals that are equipped to provide them. He claims that his customers come in at the rate of one a week from all over the world, and he finds them new "engines" in a network of 15 or so transplant hospitals he has cultivated in China, India, the Philippines, South Africa, Singapore, Pakistan and South America.
Does "transplant coordinator" Cohan have dozens of satisfied clients? Where do they live? How long have they survived their operations? He doesn't answer question like these clearly; transparency is not a feature of the international organ trade. But this much is clear: There are a lot of people doing, or trying to do, what Cohan says he does. These underground travel agents use the World Wide Web to act as middlemen between deathly ill patients in wealthy countries and hospitals in developing countries where ethical scruples about organ sources don't rise to Western levels.
According to a recent hearing in Taiwan's parliament, 450 of Taiwan's 787 transplant recipients in 2005 had their operations performed in China. The World Health Organization in Geneva estimates that 10% of the 61,000 kidney transplants performed globally in 2004 were cases of transplant tourism. Pakistan is a global hub for live kidney purchases; Aadil Hospital in Lahore offers transplant patient testimonials from Italy, Norway, Britain, Bulgaria, Uzbekistan, Sudan and Yemen. Says Dr. Luc Noel, head of the transplant unit at WHO: "Organ transplant tourism has clearly blossomed in the last five years."
In September 2005 a small tumor showed up on the liver of Kevin Scott, already suffering from hepatitis C and cirrhosis. His VA hospital took 11 months to conclude all the required transplant criteria tests, he says, and by that time the tumor had grown to 2.5 inches. "No longer has any traditional options available for survival," the medical authorities wrote in his file in August 2006. "Not a candidate for liver transplant." So Scott, 49, was on the the official liver wait list only a week before he was cut and directed to a hospice to die. But Scott and his family are fighters, and they immediately began researching transplant options in India, Germany and Mexico, before narrowing it down to China.
Yeson Healthcare Services Network, a firm in Taiwan run by one Tung-Chieh (Tony) Lee, offered the Scott family two options: a liver transplant at the Shanghai International Transplant Center for $120,000 or an $80,000 version at a no-frills provincial hospital in Nanjing. The Yeson packages include the transplant surgery; translation services; all drugs and hospital care; and up to 40 days of post-op treatment. Despite the difficulty finding an O-positive donor, "we try and control the waiting time to be within two to four weeks after arrive to our center," Lee wrote in October during e-mail exchanges with the Scott family.
The Scotts didn't have the money for Yeson's packages, so they got quotes from rival brokers. Tx-Bridge, situated in Beijing and Shanghai, bid $60,000 to $70,000 for the Scott business and even threw in a two-to-three- day "cultural experience" with its transplant packages at Wuhan and Nanjing hospitals. But when a Scott family member had the temerity to ask precisely which hospitals were involved, Tx-Bridge's Lily Huang wrote back, "Sorry, but I think your following question is wrong. Tx-Bridge center is saving life and only provides the best High Quality service package to patient. Please kindly understand that our further talking needs to be based on this."
The Scott family stopped writing to Huang and quickly got a glimpse of how the underground network of Internet transplant brokers really works. According to an organizational chart FORBES found, Shanghai's Tx-Bridge is affiliated with Alberta's Overseas Medical Services Canada, which, in turn, is represented by a retired U.S. Navy maintenance officer in Florida, Dan Adcock. "Be aware that this case has progressed as far as it can through our Chinese counterparts and from this point onward I must make all arrangements and therefore must have all communications and information," the take-charge Adcock wrote the family.
FORBES has seen transplant quotes from Internet brokers that suggest they are offering their services at markups of between 60% and 400% over costs. The resourceful Scott family ultimately used the Internet to bypass the brokers and cut a deal directly with the First Affiliated Hospital at the College of Medicine of the Zhejiang University in Hangzhou. They had to pay only an initial $2,500 for tests once they were in China, and the final bill, depending on complications, would be between $60,000 and $70,000, paid as the bills came in. According to one family member, having raided their pension funds, raised donations at their church and hosted a Web site (newliver forkevin.blogspot.com) urging members of the public to mail in $1 for Kevin's $70,000 transplant, "we simply had to find another approach" to the "prohibitive" brokerage fees.
So Kevin and family flew to the Hangzhou hospital in November, but this decent man was not entirely sure he had made the right decision. "I had a bad episode last night. I have an important friend back home, and I wish she was here," he told FORBES.
Looking to Christmas, Kevin bought little presents for Chinese patients on the ward and had his mate, Sherry, bring him a Santa Claus outfit from the U.S. for the festive day. But soon Kevin's mother, Connie Carpenter, was e-mailing loved ones, "How do I begin to write the most difficult letter of my life?" Kevin was in a coma and on life support in his hospital room. A liver that arrived at the last moment, much to the family's elation, turned out to be hiv-positive. The family had by then discovered the legal difficulties of repatriating Kevin's remains, should the worst happen, and they began battling Chinese and U.S. bureaucracies. On Dec. 22 Kevin died, Sherry and Mom at his side. The two grief-stricken women donned the Santa outfit on Christmas day and handed out the presents, fulfilling Kevin's last wish, before finally bringing him home.
There are no easy answers in this troubled corner of medicine--just heartache. Governments across the globe have almost universally outlawed the commercial trade in organs. The core principle of America's 1984 National Organ Transplant Act and the legislation of other nations: no meat markets. It's inhumane and exploitative, the authorities reason, for the rich to buy organs harvested from the poor or the imprisoned. So organ trade is mostly illegal and underground, greased along by daisy chains of brokers. By the time Nepalese authorities caught up with Hari Narayan Lam in 2003, this organ broker had convinced 50 dirt-poor Nepalese to part with a kidney. He sold their organs for $2,000 to $3,500 for transplants performed in India, and it's likely he kept the bulk of the profits. Organ sellers can get as little as $800 for their sacrifice.
"If you set a price for components of the human body, then it inevitably leads to extremes, where respect for human rights is destroyed," says Dr. Noel. "None of the brokers ever mention the costs--long-term health issues, chronic pain, inability to perform manual labor--that are borne by these poor organ vendors. And once you make organs a commercial commodity, you could conceivably go down the path where you say, 'Kill a young person and you could extend your life by 20 years.'"

 

[tracy]

This business would be less lucrative if everyone signed up to be organ donors. I don't know why people won't do it, we don't need our organs after we are dead. Imagine if just 1% of everyone who died in Canada last year had donated their organs we probably would not have to look outside of the country. When I die if anyone need a part of me it will be my honor to donate whatever I can!

I'm all for organ donation, but that said, I doubt we'll ever have enough. Very few people who die qualify to donate their organs.

Overseas transplants are almost by definition unethical. People have been buying organs from the poor in places like India for years. That's wrong by our standards, as is harvesting organs from the executed.