Published: Wednesday, March 07, 2007
A local medical business is under fire for helping North Americans acquire livers and lungs from China for organ transplants, with critics claiming the country executes prisoners to supply a burgeoning transplant industry.
Calgary-based Overseas Medical Services assists patients with purchasing organ transplants in the Communist nation for $120,000 US, facilitating four transplant surgeries recently for Americans who faced lengthy wait lists for a donor at home.
Several Canadian patients have also expressed interest in the service.
Aruna Thurairajan, the Calgary woman who owns Overseas Medical Services, and her clients insist the Chinese organs come from consenting donors.
"The people who talk about the ethical problems aren't the ones walking in the shoes of the patient," said Thurairajan, a former Sri Lankan medical administrator.
"There's no reason we should stop this. We should promote it," she added.
But human rights advocates say Ottawa and the provinces should enact laws stopping Canadians from participating in the international organ trade, arguing the industry has troubling practices.
In January, Winnipeg lawyer David Matas and former Liberal MP David Kilgour released a report alleging China is harvesting organs taken without consent from executed prisoners, mainly Falun Gong practitioners.
"We should be prohibiting this sort of traffic," said Matas in an interview from Dublin, where he was presenting results of his report.
"We need our laws to be extraterritorial so they apply when the transplant is abroad."
Matas's report implicates the Chinese military in the harvesting of the organs. It also claimed that some Canadians, including Calgary patients, had travelled to China to purchase organs.
Groups such as Human Rights Watch have also voiced concerns over the Chinese transplant industry. Some family members of executed prisoners have said they didn't give consent to donate their organs, according to the New York-based advocacy group.
China denies the allegations. A recent statement from the Chinese Embassy in Ottawa said Matas's report is based on rumours, calling it "biased and groundless."
The embassy's statement said the country only takes organs from consenting donors in accordance with World Health Organization principles.
Overseas Medical Services made headlines itself last spring when the company began brokering $30,000 US kidney transplants in Pakistan from live donors willing to sell one of their kidneys.
Thurairajan said she has since expanded her business to China because there are a wider variety of organs available for sale, including livers, lungs and hearts.
In the past six months, Thurairajan -- who receives a payment worth 10 per cent of the surgery for her services -- has arranged for three clients to have liver transplants and one to undergo a lung transplant.
She said the transplant industry is tightly regulated in China and entirely "above board."
Dr. David Wu, a foreign relations official with a group of Chinese hospitals that perform organ transplants, said transplant organs in his country are obtained from car accident victims and willing prisoners.
"People who are sentenced to death, they want to donate to compensate to society" for their wrongs, said Wu, in an interview from Arkansas, where he was attending a conference this week.
While debate rages about the Chinese transplant industry, there is nothing illegal about Thurairajan's business.
An Alberta law known as the Human Tissue Gift Act prohibits buying or selling any tissue for transplants in this province, but does not apply to the overseas organ trade.
Chris Levy, a bioethicist and legal expert at the University of Calgary, said politicians should consider toughening the legislation, noting the law suggests commercial transactions around organ transplants are not acceptable to governments.
"It doesn't prohibit people from facilitating other people going abroad," said Levy.
"That's something that, at some point, either the federal government or perhaps the provinces have to address."
At this point, however, health officials in Ottawa and Alberta don't appear ready to move on the issue.
Alberta Health spokesman Howard May said the province takes the organ trade seriously, but can't pass laws that govern activities in other countries, arguing "Alberta laws are only in effect in Alberta."
Health Canada representatives say the matter is a provincial one.
For her part, Thurairajan believes she has a responsibility to continue providing her services, adding that if Canadian authorities ever prosecuted her, she would take the issue to the Supreme Court of Canada.
About 4,000 patients in this country were waiting for organ transplants in 2006, according to the Canadian Institute for Health Information.