Nancy Scheper-Hughes, an anthropologist at the
University of California at Berkeley and co-founder of
Organs Watch, a research and documentation center, is
also a member and co-author of the Bellagio Task Force
Report on Transplantation, Bodily Integrity and the
International Traffic in Organs. In a report presented in
June 2001 to the House Subcommittee on International
Operations and Human Rights, she substantiated at least
the nationality of the alleged buyers, though not the urban
legends regarding organ theft:
"In the Middle East residents of the Gulf States (Kuwait,
Saudi Arabia, and Oman) have for many years traveled to
India, the Philippines, and to Eastern Europe to purchase
kidneys made scarce locally due to local fundamentalist
Islamic teachings that allow organ transplantation (to save
a life), but prohibit organ harvesting from brain-dead
bodies.
Meanwhile, hundreds of kidney patients from Israel,
which has its own well -developed, but under-used
transplantation centers (due to ultra-orthodox Jewish
reservations about brain death) travel in 'transplant tourist'
junkets to Turkey, Moldova, Romania where desperate
kidney sellers can be found, and to Russia where an
excess of lucrative cadaveric organs are produced due to
lax standards for designating brain death, and to South
Africa where the amenities in transplantation clinics in
private hospitals can resemble four star hotels.
We found in many countries - from Brazil and Argentina
to India, Russia, Romania, Turkey to South Africa and
parts of the United States - a kind of 'apartheid medicine'
that divides the world into two distinctly different
populations of 'organs supplies' and 'organs receivers'."
Russia, together with Estonia, China and Iraq, is, indeed, a
major harvesting and trading centre. International news
agencies described, five years ago, how a grandmother in
Ryazan tried to sell her grandchild to a mediator. The boy
was to be smuggled to the West and there dismembered
for his organs. The uncle, who assisted in the matter, was
supposed to collect $70,000 - a fortune in Russian terms.
When confronted by the European Union on this issue,
Russia responded that it lacks the resources required to
monitor organ donations. The Italian magazine, Happy
Web, reports that organ trading has taken to the Internet.
A simple query on the Google search engine yields
thousands of Web sites purporting to sell various body
parts - mostly kidneys - for up to $125,000. The sellers are
Russian, Moldovan, Ukrainian and Romanian.
Scheper-Hughes, an avid opponent of legalizing any form
of trade in organs, says that "in general, the movement
and flow of living donor organs - mostly kidneys - is from
South to North, from poor to rich, from black and brown
to white, and from female to male bodies".
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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