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 to imprisoned members of the outlawed Falun Gong 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 for transplant.

"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 such information on 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.

Doctors Against Organ Harvesting was formed in the wake of a Canadian investigation 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.

Kilgour said it is clear Falun Gong members are being targeted over other religions or ethnic groups as part of a campaign to villainize their spiritual practice, which fell out of favour with the government in 2000.

National Post