Foreign patients who travel to China for transplants are likely receiving organs culled from political prisoners who are alive when their corneas, kidneys and livers are harvested, then left to die, an international group of doctors armed with a chilling Canadian report is warning.

In a new twist on an old practice of using organs from executed criminals, China has since 2000 turned to living donors and outlawed Falun Gong members to supply a growing trade in medical transplants, Doctors Against Organ Harvesting said yesterday during a public forum held at the University of Toronto.

With increasing numbers of Canadians on long waiting lists turning to China to save their own lives, the newly formed organization is seeking to warn patients that someone else's life is likely being sacrificed in the process of obtaining organs.

"Each person who travels to China for an organ causes the death of another human," said Dr. Torsten Trey, a Washington, D.C.- based physician and founding member of Doctors Against Organ Harvesting.

The group is sounding the alarm in the medical community about mounting evidence of unethical transplants in China. They want doctors to impress the information upon their patients. They want hospitals and universities to close their doors to visiting Chinese physicians and scholars looking to hone their techniques. And they want medical journals to reject research on transplants conducted in China.

"Medical science cannot build up any knowledge which is based on inhuman and unethical procedures," said Dr. Trey, who compared China's pilfering of organs from Falun Gong practitioners to Nazi medical experimentation during the Holocaust.

Doctors Against Organ Harvesting was formed in the wake of a Canadian investigation first released last year. Authored by former Liberal MP David Kilgour and Winnipeg human rights lawyer David Matas, the report claims there is a widespread and systematic policy in China of selling organs from living donors to a growing clientele of desperate patients.

Mr. Kilgour said yesterday it is clear Falun Gong members are being targeted over other ethnic groups and religions, as a part of a campaign to villainize their spiritual practice since it fell out of favour with the government in 2000. The report's conclusions were drawn from interviews with a handful of eyewitnesses from the medical side, recipients of organs harvested in China, official government pronouncements, statistics showing a sudden explosion in the number of transplants performed, marketing web sites and undercover inquiries to hospital.

In one instance, an Asian patient recounted that after rifling through a list of potential donors , a military doctor departed and returned to the hospital several times, bringing back a total of eight different kidneys before finally settling on a match.

In another, a sick patient found out one day he needed a transplant and had an organ within 24 hours. Web sites market transplants in China in five different languages and in some cases guarantee availability of a matching organ within two weeks. The average wait time for a kidney in Canada is 32.5 months, while in British Columbia it is 52.5 months.

In surreptitious phone calls to Chinese transplant hospitals by Mandarin-speaking investigators, medical staff admitted organs came from Falun Gong prisoners.

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