Top surgeons involved in organ trafficking: Expert

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Associated Press

Posted online: Friday , February 15, 2008 at 08:10:49
Updated: Friday , February 15, 2008 at 08:29:22

Vienna, February 15: Top transplant surgeons are collaborating with criminal organ trafficking networks to target the desperate, an expert has said.

"It involves people from the highest level of their profession," said Nancy Scheper-Hughes, founding director of Organs Watch, an academic research project at the University of California, Berkeley.

Some surgeons are "willing to collaborate with the lowest levels of society - with criminal networks, brokers and with kidney hunters, who are the absolutely necessary factor," she said on Thursday.

Scheper-Hughes, a professor who is also the director of the university's medical anthropology program, made her remarks at the Vienna Forum to Fight Human Trafficking. Organs Watch has branches in 10 countries with anthropologists, human rights activists and doctors who volunteer, some of them anonymously, she said.

Illegal organ transplants made headlines recently when a man in India was accused of illegally removing hundreds of kidneys, sometimes from poor labourers held at gunpoint.

Indian police have said he headed an illegal organ transplant ring based in the New Delhi suburb of Gurgaon. Authorities believe his group sold up to 500 kidneys to clients who traveled to India from around the world in the past nine years.

"We don't really know how many people are trafficked for organs," Scheper-Hughes said, adding that a conservative estimate for the number of trafficked kidneys was 15,000 each year.

Scheper-Hughes said there were "strong cases" documenting coercion in Eastern Europe, Turkey, Israel, India and the United States.

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Comments - 2

What else to expect?Leaders loot from parliament,others loot petrol pumps,some persons are inciting religious based hatred, some are openly looting us all, what else to expect? by "Dr.Chandu" on 15 Feb 2008

With thieves,dacoits and murdrers as idols,this is bound to happen.

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Very true !! by Sharad C. Misra on 15 Feb 2008

Very true ! The ethical standards in medical profession in India being one of the lowest in the world there is strong probability of senior surgeons being involved in this macabre trafficking. Incidentally, we are reminded of a Hollywood movie 'Coma' produced by the MGM in which an American surgeon, heading an imaginary 'Boston Medical Research Institute' sells organs of comatose patients whom he keeps alive by using an elaborate computerized life-support system and fleeces their kin who visit the hospital to see them. But when he gets a demand for an organ he pulls away the life-support system from the patient to kill him and extract their organs. We would urge that this movie be shown in India. The American surgeon is caught when the boy-friend of a lady assistant of the surgeon who is comatose dies and his organs are removed. The lady informs the police and the surgeon is arreste.

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