NHS patients buy organs from Third World

 

BRITISH doctors had written “Joseph” off, saying he was too old to be treated on the National Health Service. But, at 72, he flew to Asia for a double-lung transplant and now claims to be the oldest man in Britain to have survived the operation.

Joseph — not his real name — is one of a growing number of Britons who, frustrated with NHS waiting lists, are venturing into the murky world of organ brokers offering kidneys and livers harvested from the poorest quarters of the world, sometimes illicitly. Buying an organ is illegal in Britain, but generally not in Asia.

A former factory worker, Joseph is far from wealthy. He owes his life to his two daughters who used their savings and sold a holiday home to pay the £220,000 bill. “Without their sacrifice I would probably have been dead by now,” said Joseph.

He remains unsure where his new lungs came from. The Singapore surgeons told him only that they had been donated by the family of a much younger man who died from an unspecified head trauma.

His daughters are delighted with his recovery. “You cannot guarantee the success of any major operation. But now he is out hiking,” said the eldest last week. “Just looking at him, smiling, brings tears to my eyes.”

The family acknowledges its debt to James Cohan, a self-styled “organ transplant co-ordinator” from California who spoke for the first time last week about his pioneering role in the booming organ trade.

Cohan has been “matchmaking” dangerously ill Europeans and Americans with Asian and African hospitals for 20 years. He says that over the past decade British inquiries have grown from a trickle into a flood.

Cohan, a tall, slim 66-year-old who lives in the hills outside Los Angeles, works like a stock-market day trader — with a phone and internet connection in a bedroom. He says he has seldom left home since he was arrested in Italy in 1998 for allegedly dealing in stolen body parts from South Africa, charges that were later dismissed.

He says he breaks no American laws and deals with 15 hospitals that he has verified are using only legally donated organs.

A cultural and legal mismatch between Asia and the West has led to the current “grey market” where criminal gangs thrive and the sick die on waiting lists, he claimed.

“Nightmarish tales of children snatched from streets for their organs will carry on until supply and demand are balanced. Right now there are 300,000 people on waiting lists whose lives could be saved with a more open approach to donation,” he said.

This week David Kilgour, a former Canadian MP, will publish a follow-up report to his 2006 investigation that forced China to admit its hospitals sold organs taken from executed prisoners. Kilgour is concerned that executions are timed to coincide with operations, and that surging demand may even influence sentencing.

In May, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, professor of medical anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, will publish The Ends of the Body, which will expose the horrors of the £300m-a-year trade. She will name Asian towns known as “kidney zones”, where hundreds of locals bear a diagonal scar marking the removal of an organ for £300, and have suffered ill health ever since.

“This is a cruel, unfair trade,” she said. “Technology and greed have far outstripped any government’s abilities to regulate it. It’s out of control.”

Doctors at the Aadil hospital in Lahore, Pakistan, which charges £7,500 for a kidney transplant and deals with up to 30 western organ brokers at a time, say they seek healthy organs from dozens of countries. “Our priority is health, not politics,” said a spokesman last week. “We always abide by current laws.”

However, surgeons have warned that the failure rate of overseas operations is high and have called for the trade to be banned.

Professor Nadey Hakim, president of the International College of Surgeons, said that more than half such operations end up with a bad transplant or the patients die.

“The donors get paid very little. The recipient who gets the organ is not treated well either and they get sent back in a very bad condition,” he said.