China's Bitter Harvest

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/010205/organs.htm

Say hello to your future host for the Olympics!

China's bitter harvest
The theft and sale of human body parts

By Bay Fang


FOSHAN, CHINA– Peng Xiaohong's 7-year-old son, Zhang Yao, died last November from gas poisoning while taking a bath. A devastated Peng kissed his eyes one last time before sending his body to the morgue. And she thought that was the end. But at the funeral a few days later, she noticed something strange. There were fresh cuts at the corner of his left eye. When the eyelid was opened, out came a wad of bloody cotton balls and half an eye. Gone was the most valuable part, the cornea.


At first, doctors at the district hospital in this southern city said the damage was caused by accidentally dropping the body. Then, they blamed it on rodents. Their explanations dodged the obvious: Someone stole the cornea. "It's a double tragedy," says Peng, "first that my son died and then that they had to mutilate his eye."


The larger tragedy lies in the fact that China lacks effective laws governing organ donation and transplantation. As a result, doctors take organs and tissue from bodies without permission, peasants hawk their own kidneys for quick cash, and Chinese authorities, defying the outcry from international human rights advocates, sell organs taken from executed prisoners. "Without a law, there is no institutionalized, effective system," says Xu Hong- dao, president of the China Organ Transplantation Development Foundation, who is seeking legislation on organ donation and transplantation.


Efforts to establish an organ-donor program conflict with the traditional belief of keeping one's body whole even in death. Confucius dictates that it is a gift from one's parents and that to damage it is to dishonor them. Living family members are considered the only acceptable donors. But that's hardly sufficient. For instance, some 2 million Chinese go blind from corneal diseases each year; there is reportedly a supply for only 3,000 operations.


Organs online. One result: a thriving Internet trade in organs. "I'm offering to sell one of my kidneys because I really have no other way to raise a sum of money," says An Feng, a 29-year-old from Xi'an who has posted several notices on the popular NetEase auction site. "I need to pay back a loan very urgently." One morbid posting reads, "I have organs–a heart, kidneys, corneas–for sale. I don't plan on living anymore, and I need some money for my parents' old age."


But the biggest supply still comes from China's prisons. Organs of executed convicts are usually harvested as soon as the bullets are put in the back of their heads (or hearts, if the corneas are needed). Because China executes more prisoners than the rest of the world combined, it can supply foreigners willing to pay to avoid the long waiting lists for donated organs in their home countries. "Every hospital we visited, the doctors were totally open about the organs coming from executed prisoners," says a Taiwanese man whose ailing father paid $35,000–and the standard $2,000 bribe for the doctor–to obtain a liver transplant after a two-day wait. "We were lucky that there happened to be an execution of a convict . . . whose blood type matched my dad's," he says. " They said the longest wait would only have been about a month."


The government so far has failed to curb abuses. Though some regulations exist, they are poorly enforced and not backed up by laws. Shanghai, which enacted China's first organ donation regulations, effective March 1, has expressed concern that organ smugglers will find a loophole to legalize their deals. The Ministry of Health is currently reviewing a draft national Organ Transplantation Law, which if enacted should encourage organ donations and end some of the more grisly practices. And attitudes are changing. "We did a survey of young people in Beijing, Shanghai, and Wuhan and found that 70 percent were willing to donate their organs," says Xu. "All we need is to formalize an institution to accept them."


For now, with no clear law, someone like Peng Xiaohong cannot expect redress for what happened to her son. She has been trying to sue the hospital but only to get someone to admit responsibility. "If they had only asked me whether I would donate my son's corneas for someone who needed them, I would have gladly said yes," says Peng, gazing sadly at a picture of her once bright-eyed son. "But the problem is, they had to do everything so underhandedly." For her, as with many others, a system of organ donation will have come too late.


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[This message has been edited by Timing (edited July 10, 2001).]