Organ trafficking stirs concern
- Source: Global Times
- [01:55 August 24 2009]
- Comments
By Kang Juan
The number of organ transplants from deceased donors in China is only 130 since the first case in 2003, one of the country's leading transplant experts said at a seminar yesterday.
About 11,000 transplant operations are performed each year in China, including both living- and all deceased-donor transplantations, including executed prisoners, making the country the second-largest in the world to the US in total number.
But that number it is far from enough to meet demand, Chen Zhonghua, the Chinese Medical Association's deputy director for transplanting, said at the seminar held in Xining, capital of Qinghai Province. The meeting was organized by the Ministry of Health and a subsidiary of the Novartis company.
Chen told the Global Times that that organ trafficking is the major obstacle facing China's organ-transplant practice.
According to official figures, more than 1.5 million people in China need organ transplants each year.
“The huge shortage of organ donors and organs has created a significant black market for organs, which in turn has ruined public faith and willingness to donate organs,” Chen said. “There are already signs of backlash, with the nationwide number (of donations) falling last year to 36, from 41 the previous year, and only about 10 cases so far this year.”
Chen noted that executed prisoners, with written consent either from themselves or their family members, still provide the major source of transplants in China.
He claimed, however, that organs from executed convicts are dwindling gradually amid a dramatic drop in the number of executions. This started, he said, after China's Supreme People's Court started reviewing some death penalty cases in 2007.
China passed the Regulation on Human Organ Transplantation in 2007 to ban all forms of such trafficking, prevent “transplant tourism” by foreigners, and request that living donations be restricted to spouses, lineal blood relatives or collateral blood relatives within three generations, or people sharing family bonds.
But despite the crackdown, “organ brokers” have procured organs from the poor and jobless by making them “relatives” of organ recipients by forging documents with the help of lawyers and medical workers, Chen said.
“In 2006, living transplants accounted for 15 percent of the total number of national organ transplantations; in 2007, the number reached 50 percent; last year, the number varied between 40 percent and 60 percent,” Chen said, adding that the sharp rise in the past two years is closely related to the “fake relative” phenomenon.
Mainland hospitals conducted 450 liver transplants from living donors in 2007, and 438 in 2008, accounting for most of the 1,162 total cases from 1993 through May of this year, according to data collected by CLTRnet, an online data collection system run at the University of Hong Kong.
