Organ donor cards hard to implement in China, official says
To understand the importance of today's news from China to implement consent for organ transplants or donor cards, the public may need some background on China's unethical practice of organ harvesting from imprisoned Falun Gong practitioners. This 2012 video (below) details how for a decade, Chinese military hospitals have operated a multi-million dollar human trafficking business that murders Chinese citizens — including Falun Gong prisoners of conscience — to sell their organs.
Read more at the Falun Dafa Information Center......
Quoted from the Video - "If you're going to go to China and you're going to get a liver transplant, during the three weeks you are there - then that means someone is going to go schedule an execution blood type and tissue type for the potential execution cute' and have them ready to go before you need to leave."
Related - April 2013
Reporter Wins Award for Exposing Forced Organ Harvesting in China
Showing posts with label organ trafficking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label organ trafficking. Show all posts
Friday, May 17, 2013
Tuesday, May 15, 2012
China's Plan To Stop Harvesting Prisoner's Organs-Will Be Almost Impossible To Enforce
Getty Images
China's Plan To Stop Harvesting Prisoner's Organs Will Be Almost Impossible To Enforce
Calum MacLeod, USA Today
Zhang Xinyou was one of the lucky ones.
"If you don't do a liver transplant, you'll die," doctors told the cirrhosis sufferer, recalled his wife Gao Li.
Zhang, 59, got his liver, but where it came from is something he doesn't want to ask.
"Most of the organs here come from executed prisoners," Gao, 57, says in hushed tones inside a transplant ward at the Tianjin First Center Hospital, the country's largest transplant facility. "I haven't considered whether it's right or wrong. All we want is a good liver."
As cultural taboos restrict voluntary organ donation, the systematic harvesting of organs from freshly executed prisoners provides almost two thirds of China's very limited supply of livers, kidneys, hearts, lungs and corneas, says vice health minister Huang Jiefu.
Last month, Huang announced Beijing will abolish the practice within the next three to five years and replace this controversial source with a new donation system that encourages donations of organs and regulates where they go.
That's a welcome promise but tough to realize, say analysts, who doubt Chinese authorities can quickly shift social attitudes and sweep aside a practice in which some people profit from collusion between medical staff, judicial officers and the police.
Some 10,000 transplants are performed here each year, second only to the United States. But 1.5 million Chinese are waiting for organ transplants, said state news agency Xinhua, leaving just a 1 in 150 chance. In the USA, there are about five patients for every organ, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing, a non-profit agency.
In China, overwhelming demand for organs and little supply has given rise to to underground networks that deal in organs and transplants. Doctors who oppose a new system "must be trying to protect their own interests to profit from the involvement of the courts and armed police," Huang Jiefu told the South China Morning Post newspaper.
In one recent case, a 17-year-old boy sold one of his kidneys for $3,500 to buy an iPad and iPhone.
To stop the illegal trafficking, China is testing a new system in half of the country's provinces, to be expanded nationwide this year. The new system includes computerized allocation procedures to provide faster, fairer and more transparent organ allocation.
Liu Changqiu, a legal expert at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, says the new system should reduce cases of the rich and powerful jumping the line.
From March 2010 to March 2012, pilot programs persuaded just 207 people to donate their organs after death, according to the Red Cross Society of China, which operates the transplant system. Those donors were mostly from the rural poor, and 90 percent of them, or their families, asked for "financial aid" in return for their organs.
Distrust of the new system may be one reason why there are so few donors. In a survey of residents in Guangzhou, one of China's richest cities, 81 percent of respondents worried that donated organs could be bought and sold, reported the Canton Public Opinion Research Center.
Another reason is Chinese social tradition, which says the bodyshould be whole in death to show respect to the parents who gave one that body and to ensure a complete body in the next, spiritual life. Such beliefs "still have a great influence in China, and these concepts will take decades to change," says Liu Changqiu.
Despite public pressure to donate, hundreds of organ donor coordinators employed by the new system are having little luck.
In China's eastern Shandong province, none of the coordinators managed a successful case in 18 months, reported the local Life Daily newspaper. The most striking refusal came from the parents of a 21 year-old single woman. They planned to bury her beside a dead bachelor, and thus marry them off in the next life, coordinator Liu Hong said. In Tianjin, a port city of 13 million people east of Beijing, a total of 19 donations since 2010 placed it second among all the pilot schemes.
The publicity drive to spur donations hardly appears aggressive: No organ donor materials were on display at the large Tianjin No. 2 Hospital.
Liu, the legal expert, supports the use of prisoner organs given the difficulties of getting organs elsewhere, provided the prisoners consent. Beijing says death row prisoners, or their relatives, do consent to donate organs. Rights activists disagree.
"Prisoners can never give meaningful consent," says Sarah Schafer, a Hong Kong-based China researcher for Amnesty International.
Beside the issue of consent, there is the matter of who is being executed to provide organs. The Dui Hua Foundation, a U.S.-based human rights group, estimates that China executes 4,000 people a year, more than all other countries in the world combined (The USA carried out 43 executions in 2011).
While only the most heinous of murderers are eligible for capital punishment in the U.S., the banned spiritual group Falungong has long alleged that many of its adherents have been executed for their organs.
Without addressing such accusations, Huang, the health official, said it is not for moral reasons that China should stop using prisoner organs, but for practical ones. Prisoner organs, he says, are less desirable because of high rates of fungal and bacterial infection that result in lower long-term survival rates than in other countries.
Meanwhile, the black market is thriving and operates in a fairly open manner. "Underground" dealers are found quickly on the Internet. Buyers in need of organs pay between $32,000 to $63,000, say these illegal brokers, who insist they are merely helping people and are professional.
In China's biggest organ-trafficking case, 16 people, including medical professionals, were charged in February with crimes relating to the removal of over 50 kidneys in 2010, earning $1.6 million, reported the Procuratorial Daily. The doctors operated out of a four-story house turned makeshift clinic in a northwest suburb of Beijing.
"We never knew that was going on in our neighborhood, but I know the high profits are worth the risks for the middlemen," says Wang Yanxia, a doctor at a nearby health clinic.
In Shanxi province, Li Lidan and her parents have moved into a simple cave house for $16 a month to be near the Changzhi county hospital where Li undergoes dialysis to keep her alive.
"I envy people who had transplants, they can live longer, get a job and live a normal life," says Li, 25, who needs a kidney to live and doesn't care if it comes from a prisoner or the black market.
Despite a less than 1 percent chance of a kidney becoming available, Li is hopeful.
"I'm already a lucky person," she says. "There are still many good people out there. In the future, there will be a donor for me."
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Source-
http://www.businessinsider.com/chinas-plan-to-stop-harvesting-prisoners-organs-will-be-almost-impossible-to-enforce-2012-5
***Additional Links From HCV New Drugs....
Falun Data Information Center
Why is Falun Gong being persecuted in China “Why did the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) ban Falun Gong?” “Why does the Chinese government see Falun Gong as a threat?” Below are some answers. Although they are presented here as distinct explanations, the different reasons are, of course, interconnected in many ways.
Starting in March 2006, three independent witnesses have publicly stated that some hospitals in China remove organs from imprisoned Falun Gong practitioners without obtaining their prior consent. The witnesses further stated that the unwilling victims had been incarcerated in facilities that resemble detention centers or concentration camps. Their tissue compatibility was systematically analyzed and stored in data banks. This process allowed Chinese transplant surgeons to provide donor organs including kidney, heart, pancreas, liver, skin, and cornea on short notice. Publicly accessible websites of some of these transplant centers promised to provide donor organs within 2-4 weeks, in some cases even within 2 days. In Western countries, the waiting time for organs usually amounts to several years.
The website of the Tianjin Oriental Organ Transplantation Center has documented the increase of liver transplants in a chart, which might serve as example for the expansion of the transplant medicine.
Wang Lijun Suspected in Falun Gong Organ Harvest, Group Says
‘Still Alive’In a previous interview with The Epoch Times David Matas, a Canadian human rights lawyer who co-authored a report on organ harvesting from Falun Gong prisoners, said that “It used to be that China would shoot for execution, then they shifted from shooting to using injections. In effect they’re not killing by injection, but paralyzing by injection, and taking the organs out while the body is still alive.”
Saturday, October 29, 2011
First ever proven case of black-market organ trafficking in the United States.
NYC man pleads guilty to kidney trafficking
TRENTON, N.J. (AP) -- A New York man pleaded guilty Thursday to what experts said was the first ever proven case of black-market organ trafficking in the United States.
Levy Izhak Rosenbaum admitted in federal court in Trenton that he had brokered three illegal kidney transplants for New Jersey-based customers in exchange for payments of $120,000 or more. He also pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to broker an illegal kidney sale.
His attorneys, Ronald Kleinberg and Richard Finkel, said in a statement that their client had performed a life-saving service for desperately ill people who had been languishing on official transplant waiting lists.
"The transplants were successful and the donors and recipients are now leading full and healthy lives," the statement said. "In fact, because of the transplants and for the first time in many years, the recipients are no longer burdened by the medical and substantial health dangers associated with dialysis and kidney failure."
The lawyers added that Rosenbaum had never solicited clients, but that recipients had sought him out, and that the donors he arranged to give up kidneys were fully aware of what they were doing. The money involved, they argued, was for expenses associated with the procedures, which they claim were performed in prestigious American hospitals by experienced surgeons and transplant experts. The lawyers did not name the hospitals involved, nor are they named in court documents.
Prosecutors argued that Rosenbaum was fully aware he was running an illicit and profitable operation - buying organs from vulnerable people in Israel for $10,000, and selling them to desperate, wealthy American patients.
"A black market in human organs is not only a grave threat to public health, it reserves lifesaving treatment for those who can best afford it at the expense of those who cannot," said New Jersey's U.S. Attorney, Paul Fishman. "We will not tolerate such an affront to human dignity."
Each of the four counts carries a maximum five-year prison sentence plus a fine of up to $250,000. Rosenbaum also agreed to forfeit $420,000 in real or personal property that was derived from the illegal kidney sales.
The 60-year-old Rosenbaum is a member of the Orthodox Jewish community in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn, where he had told neighbors he was in the construction business.
He was arrested in July 2009 in a sweeping federal case that became the largest corruption sting in New Jersey history. Though he was one of more than 40 people arrested, including politicians and rabbis in New Jersey and Brooklyn, and was not a rabbi himself, the image of rabbis illegally selling kidneys garnered international headlines and made its way into the routines of late-night comedians for weeks afterward.
Rosenbaum was arrested after he tried to set up a kidney sale to a man posing as a crooked businessman but who actually was government informant Solomon Dwek, a disgraced real estate speculator facing prison time for a $50 million bank fraud.
Dwek, wearing a wire for federal investigators, brought Rosenbaum an undercover FBI agent posing as his secretary, who claimed to be searching for a kidney for a sick uncle on dialysis who was on a transplant list at a Philadelphia hospital.
"I am what you call a matchmaker," Rosenbaum said in a secretly recorded conversation. "I bring a guy (who) I believe, he's suitable for your uncle."
Asked how many organs he had brokered, he said: "Quite a lot," the most recent two weeks earlier.
For someone who was not a surgeon, Rosenbaum seemed in his recorded conversations to have a thorough knowledge of the ins and outs of kidney donations, including how to fool hospitals into believing the donor was acting solely out of compassion for a friend or loved one.
He was recorded saying that money had to be spread around liberally, to Israeli doctors, visa preparers and those who cared for the organ donors in this country. "One of the reasons it's so expensive is because you have to shmear (pay others) all the time," he was quoted as saying.
"So far, I've never had a failure," he bragged on tape. "I'm doing this a long time."
At a 2008 meeting with the undercover agent, Rosenbaum claimed he had an associate who worked for an insurance company in Brooklyn who could take the recipient's blood samples, store them on dry ice and send them to Israel, where they would be tested to see if they matched the prospective donor, authorities said. Donors would then be brought from Israel and undergo surgery to remove the kidney in a U.S. hospital, according to court documents.
Although the hospitals where the operations Rosenbaum arranged have not been named, critics and experts on organ trafficking say many U.S. hospitals do not have vigorous enough procedures for looking into the source of the organs they transplant because such operations are lucrative.
Despite guidelines from various groups and Medicare, U.S. transplant centers are mostly free to write their own rules for screening donors to make sure they are not selling their organs. The questions they ask vary widely. Some hospitals require long waiting periods to weed out shady donors; others don't.
Under 1984 federal law, it is illegal for anyone to knowingly buy or sell organs for transplant. The practice is illegal just about everywhere else in the world, too.
But demand for kidneys far outstrips the supply, with 4,540 people dying in the U.S. last year while waiting for a kidney, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing. As a result, there is a thriving black market for kidneys around the world.
Art Caplan, the director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania and a co-chairman of a United Nations task force on organ trafficking, said kidneys are the most common of all trafficked organs because they can be harvested from live donors, unlike other organs. He said Rosenbaum had pleaded guilty to one of the "most heinous crimes against another human being."
"Internationally, about one quarter of all kidneys appear to be trafficked," Caplan said. "But until this case, it had not been a crime recognized as reaching the United States."
---
Porter reported from Newark.
---
Friday, August 5, 2011
Organ Harvesting-China to crack down on illegal transplants
Falun Gong
Since the Chinese Communist Party banned Falun Gong in China in 1999, the Chinese authorities have utilized a wide variety of mechanisms in their efforts to force adherents to renounce their faith and ultimately wipe out the spiritual group.
Falun Gong Practitioner Zhou Xiangyang Resists Persecution with Hunger
August 2, 2011
Mr. Zhou Xiangyang has been holding hunger strikes to resist the persecution after he was arrested and sent to Gangbei Prison, Tianjin City on March 5, 2011. His mother and wife have only been able to see him twice in the past four months, and those two times were because the prison was pressured from the outside. Mr. Zhou looked very thin and weak when his family saw him. He asked his family members to hire a lawyer to sue the police for the illegal arrest and ransacking of his home.
Organ Harvesting Overview
Mounting evidence tells a terrible tale of murder and mutilation in China. Witnesses and Chinese physicians reveal that thousands of persons affiliated with the Falun Gong are being killed for their organs, which are sold and transplanted at enormous profit.
The kidneys, livers, and hearts are often sold on demand to overseas patients, who can afford them. That is, the prisoners of conscience are tissue typed and then killed once a matching recipient is found for their organs. (see 2010 video below)
China Announces Measures to Limit Illegal Organ Transplants
Thursday, August 4th, 2011 at 7:15 am UTC
Chinese state media say the government is testing a new system to detect and prevent illegal human organ procurements and transplants.
The Communist Party flagship People's Daily said Thursday the system will make it easier for doctors and the public to report illegal organ trading. In an article first published in Taiwan's China Daily, it said the Chinese health ministry is also considering a registration system for organ transplant surgeons.
The article says China has a problem with illegal agencies that resort to forging paperwork to find matching organs for patients. It says the country also has unqualified hospitals that conduct organ transplants for large profits.
Foreign news organizations and rights groups say as many as two-thirds of the organs used in Chinese transplants come from executed prisoners. They also say wealthy foreigners travel to China seeking to purchase organs from unscrupulous dealers.
China to crack down on illegal transplants
Updated: 2011-08-04 07:31
By Shan Juan (China Daily)
BEIJING - China's Ministry of Health is set to establish a reporting system in a bid to crack down on illegal human organ procurements and transplants, a statement on the ministry's website said on Tuesday.
Due to a severe shortage of donated organs for transplants, some hospitals on the mainland resort to illegal organ trading, seriously tarnishing the image of the industry and undermining its healthy and sustainable development, said Vice-Minister of Health Huang Jiefu.
"The coming system held by the ministry would be open to qualified transplant centers nationwide and the general public to receive tip-offs on illegal practices, primarily the living organ trades," said Xia Qiang, director of the liver surgery and transplant department of Renji Hospital in Shanghai, who was invited by the ministry to attend a conference about the new initiative on July 15.
Liu Yong, a division director of the ministry's department of medical regulation, said the system is now under trial operation.
At the meeting, stakeholders including officials and clinical doctors also discussed a registration system especially for organ transplant surgeons, which might be introduced soon to further regulate the practice.
"That's more in line with international practices and has been written into the revised version of the current regulations for organ transplants, which are still under revision at the State Council," Liu said.
Currently, to land matching organs, some illegal agencies turn to living organ trades by forging paperwork, experts said.
In a recent court case in Nanjing, East China's Jiangsu province, a human-organ trafficking suspect surnamed Su was accused of organizing illegal organ trades at least seven times from 2008 to March this year.
In addition, some unqualified hospitals also carry out organ transplants for large profits, which poses health risks to the recipients who have usually failed to land a match at qualified hospitals, said Qian Jianmin, chief transplant surgeon with the Shanghai Huashan Hospital.
Due to the limited capacity of the unqualified hospitals, such desperate patients have to go to authorized transplant centers for follow-up services, said Xia.
"Under the coming system, centers are encouraged to report such situations to the ministry to help authorities detect and end such irregularities," he said.
"So far we don't know when the system will formally begin operation and whether it's mandatory reporting or not for transplant centers," he noted.
"Like me, I think most of the practitioners would welcome such a move," he added.
Currently, China has more than 140 competent organ transplant centers registered with the ministry nationwide.
To encourage the nation's first deceased organ donation system - operated by the ministry and the Red Cross Society of China - the ministry planned to authorize more centers to procure organ donations only from the system, which was now in trial runs in selected regions.
"That takes time, at least several decades, for the industry to shake off a long-term dependence on executed prisoners as the dominant organ source," Qian said.
Official statistics showed that of 1.5 million Chinese who need transplants each year, only 10,000 can receive one, largely due to scarce organ donations.
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/usa/china/2011-08/04/content_13047419.htm
Related
Govt announces crackdown on illegal organ transplants Source: Global Times
[01:58 April 19 2011]
By Zhang Han
The Ministry of Health (MOH) on Monday issued a circular calling for tighter supervision of human organ transplants, and announced a new round of crackdowns on illegal operations.The circular said unauthorized medical personnel or institutions that carried out organ transplants would be severely punished. Institutions would be fined eight to 10 times the fees charged for the transplant, and would also be downgraded as well as suspended.
The MOH also said it would launch a nationwide campaign that would mainly focus on illegal transplants in unauthorized medical institutions, the Beijing Evening News reported.The campaign will continue until the end of this year.
The MOH's recent moves come in the wake of a widely reported case of a 26-year-old who had had his kidney forcibly removed by staff at a hospital in Linfen, Shanxi Province, the Beijing Evening News reported on Monday.
The victim, Hu Jie, had gone to an underground kidney market and discussed selling his kidney in order to pay back his 18,000 yuan ($2,757) of debt last year. However, when he decided to abandon the plan at the last moment, personnel from the market as well as Changliang Hospital in Linfen forced him to go through with it, China National Radio reported.
The Shanxi health ministry confirmed the report and ordered the hospital to suspend its operations."The case is a typical example of an illegal transplant being carried out in a medical institution that has not been authorized to undertake this kind of operation," Ren Guoliang, a professor of anatomy at Zhejiang University, told the Global Times.The circular also stated that medical institutions or personnel not authorized to conduct organ transplants would not be allowed to extract human organs for any reason.
Currently, 163 hospitals in China have the authority to carry out organ transplant operations.
Wang Qiong contributed to this story
2010 Video; Witness To China's Organ Harvesting
Uploaded by NTDTV on Aug 6, 2010
A witness to organ harvesting in China is now in immigration limbo in Switzerland.
Nijat Abudureyimu used to work at a prison in north-western Xinjiang Province.
His job was to lead prisoners from their cells to their executions. But, according to the Epoch Times, these executions weren't conventional.
Police would shoot the prisoners in a way that would not kill them, so that their organs would be in prime condition to be taken out for transplant surgeries. The Uighur security agent worked at the prison of Liuwandao from 1993 to 1998. In a recent interview with Swiss newspaper Le Matin, Abudureyimu said (quote) "I saw many scenes of torture ... an electrical appliance on women's genitals...the electric shocks, the scream." Abudureyimu fled Xinjiang in 2006. His refugee application in Norway was rejected, and while waiting to be assessed in Italy, he fled to Switzerland after feeling threatened when a Chinese man photographed him at an Italian refugee camp. So far Swiss authorities seem unwilling to deal with Abudureyimu's case.
They are relying rigidly on an EU regulation requiring the country of entry to assess the asylum seekers' claims.In Abudureyimu's case, Italy has to assess his claim, and he will either send him back there or be deported to China. Alim Seytoff from the World Uighur Congress says Abudureyimu needs to be granted asylum for his own safety.[Alim Seytoff, Vice Chairman, World Uyghur Congress]:"It is our hope that Swiss government, in light of his unique situation, will consider granting him political asylum in Switzerland. Because returning him to China is like sentencing him to death.
The Chinese government will simply execute him."Author and researcher Ethan Gutmann told the Epoch Times that Abudureyimu is an important witness of organ harvesting by the Chinese communist regime. Instead of deporting him, Gutmann says the Swiss authorities should have Abudureyimu testify before a government organization.Gutmann and other international human rights activists have been investigating claims that the Chinese regime has been systematically taking organs from living Falun Gong practitioners, and selling them for profit, since it began persecuting members of the spiritual group in 1999.
Since the Chinese Communist Party banned Falun Gong in China in 1999, the Chinese authorities have utilized a wide variety of mechanisms in their efforts to force adherents to renounce their faith and ultimately wipe out the spiritual group.
Falun Gong Practitioner Zhou Xiangyang Resists Persecution with Hunger
August 2, 2011
Mr. Zhou Xiangyang has been holding hunger strikes to resist the persecution after he was arrested and sent to Gangbei Prison, Tianjin City on March 5, 2011. His mother and wife have only been able to see him twice in the past four months, and those two times were because the prison was pressured from the outside. Mr. Zhou looked very thin and weak when his family saw him. He asked his family members to hire a lawyer to sue the police for the illegal arrest and ransacking of his home.
Organ Harvesting Overview
Mounting evidence tells a terrible tale of murder and mutilation in China. Witnesses and Chinese physicians reveal that thousands of persons affiliated with the Falun Gong are being killed for their organs, which are sold and transplanted at enormous profit.
The kidneys, livers, and hearts are often sold on demand to overseas patients, who can afford them. That is, the prisoners of conscience are tissue typed and then killed once a matching recipient is found for their organs. (see 2010 video below)
China Announces Measures to Limit Illegal Organ Transplants
Thursday, August 4th, 2011 at 7:15 am UTC
Chinese state media say the government is testing a new system to detect and prevent illegal human organ procurements and transplants.
The Communist Party flagship People's Daily said Thursday the system will make it easier for doctors and the public to report illegal organ trading. In an article first published in Taiwan's China Daily, it said the Chinese health ministry is also considering a registration system for organ transplant surgeons.
The article says China has a problem with illegal agencies that resort to forging paperwork to find matching organs for patients. It says the country also has unqualified hospitals that conduct organ transplants for large profits.
Foreign news organizations and rights groups say as many as two-thirds of the organs used in Chinese transplants come from executed prisoners. They also say wealthy foreigners travel to China seeking to purchase organs from unscrupulous dealers.
China to crack down on illegal transplants
Updated: 2011-08-04 07:31
By Shan Juan (China Daily)
BEIJING - China's Ministry of Health is set to establish a reporting system in a bid to crack down on illegal human organ procurements and transplants, a statement on the ministry's website said on Tuesday.
Due to a severe shortage of donated organs for transplants, some hospitals on the mainland resort to illegal organ trading, seriously tarnishing the image of the industry and undermining its healthy and sustainable development, said Vice-Minister of Health Huang Jiefu.
"The coming system held by the ministry would be open to qualified transplant centers nationwide and the general public to receive tip-offs on illegal practices, primarily the living organ trades," said Xia Qiang, director of the liver surgery and transplant department of Renji Hospital in Shanghai, who was invited by the ministry to attend a conference about the new initiative on July 15.
Liu Yong, a division director of the ministry's department of medical regulation, said the system is now under trial operation.
At the meeting, stakeholders including officials and clinical doctors also discussed a registration system especially for organ transplant surgeons, which might be introduced soon to further regulate the practice.
"That's more in line with international practices and has been written into the revised version of the current regulations for organ transplants, which are still under revision at the State Council," Liu said.
Currently, to land matching organs, some illegal agencies turn to living organ trades by forging paperwork, experts said.
In a recent court case in Nanjing, East China's Jiangsu province, a human-organ trafficking suspect surnamed Su was accused of organizing illegal organ trades at least seven times from 2008 to March this year.
In addition, some unqualified hospitals also carry out organ transplants for large profits, which poses health risks to the recipients who have usually failed to land a match at qualified hospitals, said Qian Jianmin, chief transplant surgeon with the Shanghai Huashan Hospital.
Due to the limited capacity of the unqualified hospitals, such desperate patients have to go to authorized transplant centers for follow-up services, said Xia.
"Under the coming system, centers are encouraged to report such situations to the ministry to help authorities detect and end such irregularities," he said.
"So far we don't know when the system will formally begin operation and whether it's mandatory reporting or not for transplant centers," he noted.
"Like me, I think most of the practitioners would welcome such a move," he added.
Currently, China has more than 140 competent organ transplant centers registered with the ministry nationwide.
To encourage the nation's first deceased organ donation system - operated by the ministry and the Red Cross Society of China - the ministry planned to authorize more centers to procure organ donations only from the system, which was now in trial runs in selected regions.
"That takes time, at least several decades, for the industry to shake off a long-term dependence on executed prisoners as the dominant organ source," Qian said.
Official statistics showed that of 1.5 million Chinese who need transplants each year, only 10,000 can receive one, largely due to scarce organ donations.
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/usa/china/2011-08/04/content_13047419.htm
Related
Govt announces crackdown on illegal organ transplants Source: Global Times
[01:58 April 19 2011]
By Zhang Han
The Ministry of Health (MOH) on Monday issued a circular calling for tighter supervision of human organ transplants, and announced a new round of crackdowns on illegal operations.The circular said unauthorized medical personnel or institutions that carried out organ transplants would be severely punished. Institutions would be fined eight to 10 times the fees charged for the transplant, and would also be downgraded as well as suspended.
The MOH also said it would launch a nationwide campaign that would mainly focus on illegal transplants in unauthorized medical institutions, the Beijing Evening News reported.The campaign will continue until the end of this year.
The MOH's recent moves come in the wake of a widely reported case of a 26-year-old who had had his kidney forcibly removed by staff at a hospital in Linfen, Shanxi Province, the Beijing Evening News reported on Monday.
The victim, Hu Jie, had gone to an underground kidney market and discussed selling his kidney in order to pay back his 18,000 yuan ($2,757) of debt last year. However, when he decided to abandon the plan at the last moment, personnel from the market as well as Changliang Hospital in Linfen forced him to go through with it, China National Radio reported.
The Shanxi health ministry confirmed the report and ordered the hospital to suspend its operations."The case is a typical example of an illegal transplant being carried out in a medical institution that has not been authorized to undertake this kind of operation," Ren Guoliang, a professor of anatomy at Zhejiang University, told the Global Times.The circular also stated that medical institutions or personnel not authorized to conduct organ transplants would not be allowed to extract human organs for any reason.
Currently, 163 hospitals in China have the authority to carry out organ transplant operations.
Wang Qiong contributed to this story
2010 Video; Witness To China's Organ Harvesting
Uploaded by NTDTV on Aug 6, 2010
A witness to organ harvesting in China is now in immigration limbo in Switzerland.
Nijat Abudureyimu used to work at a prison in north-western Xinjiang Province.
His job was to lead prisoners from their cells to their executions. But, according to the Epoch Times, these executions weren't conventional.
Police would shoot the prisoners in a way that would not kill them, so that their organs would be in prime condition to be taken out for transplant surgeries. The Uighur security agent worked at the prison of Liuwandao from 1993 to 1998. In a recent interview with Swiss newspaper Le Matin, Abudureyimu said (quote) "I saw many scenes of torture ... an electrical appliance on women's genitals...the electric shocks, the scream." Abudureyimu fled Xinjiang in 2006. His refugee application in Norway was rejected, and while waiting to be assessed in Italy, he fled to Switzerland after feeling threatened when a Chinese man photographed him at an Italian refugee camp. So far Swiss authorities seem unwilling to deal with Abudureyimu's case.
They are relying rigidly on an EU regulation requiring the country of entry to assess the asylum seekers' claims.In Abudureyimu's case, Italy has to assess his claim, and he will either send him back there or be deported to China. Alim Seytoff from the World Uighur Congress says Abudureyimu needs to be granted asylum for his own safety.[Alim Seytoff, Vice Chairman, World Uyghur Congress]:"It is our hope that Swiss government, in light of his unique situation, will consider granting him political asylum in Switzerland. Because returning him to China is like sentencing him to death.
The Chinese government will simply execute him."Author and researcher Ethan Gutmann told the Epoch Times that Abudureyimu is an important witness of organ harvesting by the Chinese communist regime. Instead of deporting him, Gutmann says the Swiss authorities should have Abudureyimu testify before a government organization.Gutmann and other international human rights activists have been investigating claims that the Chinese regime has been systematically taking organs from living Falun Gong practitioners, and selling them for profit, since it began persecuting members of the spiritual group in 1999.
Monday, June 13, 2011
EU in Kosovo says Turk, Israeli trafficked organs
PRISTINA, Kosovo —
A European Union prosecutor in Kosovo has indicted a Turkish and an Israeli national for involvement in an international network that falsely promised poor people money for their kidneys and then transplanted the organs into rich buyers, the bloc's rule of law mission said Monday.
Turkish citizen Yusuf Sonmez, and Israel's Moshe Harel were charged last week for "trafficking in persons, organized crime and unlawful exercise of medical activity," the mission, known as EULEX, said in a statement.
Sonmez and Harel are considered at large by EU authorities and Interpol has issued a warrant for their arrest.
The indictments are part of a larger investigation into allegations that an organized criminal group conducted operations in a clinic outside of the capital Pristina where the victims' organs were transplanted into the buyers.
EU prosecutor Jonathan Ratel - who brought the charges in 2010 - said victims were promised up to $20,000 (euro14,000) for their kidneys, but were never paid, while recipients were required to pay between euro80,000 and euro100,000 euros ($115,000-$143,000).
The victims came from Moldova, Kazakhstan, Russia and Turkey, and lived in "extreme poverty or acute financial distress," EULEX said.
Kosovo law forbids the removal and transplant of organs.
The case was brought to the attention of authorities in 2008 when Kosovo police acted upon information from a Turkish national who said his kidney had been stolen.
Since then seven Kosovars, including doctors and a senior official in the Health Ministry, have been charged and are standing trial.
Sonmez and Harel were indicted separately after EU investigators located Harel in Israel and an EU prosecutor interviewed Sonmez in Turkey earlier this year. Harel was detained in 2008, but later allowed to leave Kosovo upon the promise of return pending legal proceedings.
Read more:
http://www.thenewstribune.com/2011/06/13/1704263/eu-in-kosovo-says-turk-israeli.html#ixzz1PCdRDHh6
A European Union prosecutor in Kosovo has indicted a Turkish and an Israeli national for involvement in an international network that falsely promised poor people money for their kidneys and then transplanted the organs into rich buyers, the bloc's rule of law mission said Monday.
Turkish citizen Yusuf Sonmez, and Israel's Moshe Harel were charged last week for "trafficking in persons, organized crime and unlawful exercise of medical activity," the mission, known as EULEX, said in a statement.
A European Union prosecutor in Kosovo has indicted a Turkish and an Israeli national for involvement in an international network that falsely promised poor people money for their kidneys and then transplanted the organs into rich buyers, the bloc's rule of law mission said Monday.
The indictments are part of a larger investigation into allegations that an organized criminal group conducted operations in a clinic outside of the capital Pristina where the victims' organs were transplanted into the buyers.
EU prosecutor Jonathan Ratel - who brought the charges in 2010 - said victims were promised up to $20,000 (euro14,000) for their kidneys, but were never paid, while recipients were required to pay between euro80,000 and euro100,000 euros ($115,000-$143,000).
The victims came from Moldova, Kazakhstan, Russia and Turkey, and lived in "extreme poverty or acute financial distress," EULEX said.
Kosovo law forbids the removal and transplant of organs.
The case was brought to the attention of authorities in 2008 when Kosovo police acted upon information from a Turkish national who said his kidney had been stolen.
Since then seven Kosovars, including doctors and a senior official in the Health Ministry, have been charged and are standing trial.
Sonmez and Harel were indicted separately after EU investigators located Harel in Israel and an EU prosecutor interviewed Sonmez in Turkey earlier this year. Harel was detained in 2008, but later allowed to leave Kosovo upon the promise of return pending legal proceedings.
Read more:
http://www.thenewstribune.com/2011/06/13/1704263/eu-in-kosovo-says-turk-israeli.html#ixzz1PCdRDHh6
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