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Israel is using Palestinian Boys' Organs!
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Organ Buyer Moshe Tati
Moshe was 43 years old, and he was dying, and not one of his family members was a suitable match for a kidney donation. So he called the broker.
Moshe lives in Israel, which happens to be one of the more active nations in the international organ-trafficking market. The market, which is completely illegal, is so complex and well organized that a single transaction often crosses three continents: a broker from Los Angeles, say, matches an Italian with kidney failure to a seller in Jordan, for surgery in Istanbul. [...]
The sale of human organs, whether from a living person or a cadaver, is against the law in virtually every country (Iran is perhaps the only exception) and has been condemned by all of the world's medical associations. [...]
Yet in Israel and a handful of other nations, including India, Turkey, China, Russia and Iraq, organ sales are conducted with only a scant nod toward secrecy. In Israel, there is even tacit government acceptance of the practice — the national health-insurance program covers part, and sometimes all, of the cost of brokered transplants. [...]
Paying for an organ has become so routine in Israel that there have been instances in which a patient has elected not to accept the offer of a kidney donation from a well-matched relative. 'Why risk harm to a family member?' one patient told me. Instead, these patients have decided that purchasing a kidney from someone they've never met — in almost all cases someone who is impoverished and living in a foreign land — is a far more palatable option.
I can get you a kidney immediately,' said the broker whom Moshe Tati called. 'All I need is the money.' Then he quoted a price: $145,000, cash, paid in advance. [...]
Desire for a living donor is another reason why dialysis patients often prefer to purchase a kidney and circumvent national programs, where legally transplanted organs are almost always from cadavers. An Israeli kidney buyer named Avriham, who used the same broker as Moshe Tati and traveled to Eastern Europe, described this notion in his own terms: 'Why should I wait years just to have a kidney from someone who was in a car accident, pinned in his car for hours, then in miserable condition in the I.C.U. for days, and only then, after all that trauma, have part of him put inside me? That organ is not going to be any good! Or, worse, I could get the organ of an elderly person, a person who died of a stroke or an aneurysm — that kidney is all used up! It's better to take a kidney from a healthy young man who can also benefit from the money. Where I went, families were so poor they didn't even have bread to eat. The money I gave was a gift equal to the gift I received. I insisted on seeing my donor. He was young and very healthy, very strong. It was perfect, just what I was hoping for. A dream kidney.' [...]
When Moshe's plane landed in Istanbul, there was no need to clear customs, no one asking for passports. 'Everything was already taken care of,' Moshe says. 'The organization was like clockwork.' Moshe and the other three patients were driven to a hospital — An old hospital,' Moshe says, 'not modern, but very clean' — and their family and friends were taken to a hotel. [...]
'As I was being prepared for surgery,' Moshe says, 'I saw the man who was giving me his kidney. I just glimpsed him briefly. He was in an operating room across from me. We never spoke; when I saw him, he was already asleep, at the beginning of his surgery. [...]
Drawbacks of Selling Off One's Body Piecemeal
Scheper-Hughes remains unconvinced that selling a kidney is actually a low-risk activity. She says she feels that the chief tenet of the Hippocratic Oath — do no harm — is being violated. 'In these deals you are certainly harming someone else,' she says. 'You are harming the sellers.' The argument that the slight harm to the sellers is more than offset by the lifesaving potential on the other end of the transaction is also troubling to Scheper-Hughes. 'I call this 'increasing the net good,'' she says. 'Is this really the kind of world we want to live in — one based on utilitarian ethics in which net gain to one relatively privileged population allows them to claim property rights over the bodies of the disadvantaged?'
Further, she points out, every study demonstrating that kidney donation does not compromise health has been conducted in a wealthy nation. 'It is not exactly clear that poor people can really live safely with one kidney,' she says. People who sell their kidneys, she adds, usually live in abject conditions and face greater-than-average threats to their health, including poor diets, low-quality drinking water and increased risk of infectious disease, all of which can easily compromise the remaining kidney.
The actual kidney-removal surgery may also not be as gentle as advertised. Even Michael Friedlaender admits that removal surgery is a more painful procedure than transplantation. After a surgeon has carved through skin, fat and several layers of muscle, getting at a kidney sometimes necessitates the partial extraction of the 12th rib. Short-term complications have been documented in nearly one in five kidney-donation surgeries. [...]
There is further concern about the notion that sellers are making an autonomous choice. Lawrence Cohen, an associate professor of medical anthropology at Berkeley and the other founder of Organs Watch, has done much of his fieldwork in India. He recently studied 30 kidney sellers in the city of Chennai. Twenty-seven of them were women. Some of their husbands, Cohen learned, made it clear that if the men had to do heavy labor, it was only fair that the women contribute to the family income by selling a kidney. Cohen observed that in none of the cases did selling an organ significantly improve the family's fortunes in the long run. 'If only I had three kidneys,' one of the women told Cohen, 'then I could sell two and things might be better.'
'Nobody seems concerned about the sellers,' Scheper-Hughes says. 'The buyers are supported by doctors, but no one represents the sellers. Nobody solicits their opinions. In this market, they have become an invisible population. Someone needs to listen to them. What do they have to say?' [...]
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Go and look at the pictures; use the this Link!
http://www.ukar.org/asper/asper01.html
R. Zuercher
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