Human kidneys: The new cash crop - Currents: Poverty

New Internationalist, March, 2003 by Nancy Scheper-Hughes

In fact a government-regulated programme is already in place in Iran where for the past five years kidney sellers have been recruited directly from the slums and from among the homeless by a non-governmental medical self-help organization, Benaid Amuz-e Bimarihay-e Khas. Under the Iranian programme, kidney sellers are paid an officially designated pittance (about $280 each) in addition to whatever can be arranged between the donor and the recipient. The only follow-up study, conducted by an Iranian urologist, found kidney sellers reporting considerable pain, shame, anger, resentment and hatred for both the surgeons who removed their body part and the patients who received their organ.

In Moldova, where kidney selling is seen not only as a crime but as a personal affront to national pride, local police, collaborating with INTERPOL, have cracked down on some of the more notorious local kidney brokers, like Nina (see story above), who is today in hiding outside the country. Despite these positive moves, as recently as February 2002, responding to a tip from Organs Watch, Turkish health officials raided a small private hospital in a suburb of Istanbul where they found foreign patients recovering from kidney transplants with organs procured from four young men from rural Moldova, who were themselves recovering in a separate ward. The Turkish surgeon was arrested but later released when his lawyer produced signed consent forms, although none of the rural sellers could speak, understand or read a word of Turkish.

To date, the buying and selling of kidneys is yet to be recognized as a growing medical human-rights abuse. The time has come for the World Medical Association, the World Health Organization, the Council of Europe, and the governments of those countries now producing the majority of organ buyers and sellers to take concerted action.

Nancy Scheper-Hughes is a professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley and Director of Organs Watch.

This article is an edited extract from the author's forthcoming book The Ends of the Body: the Global Traffic in Organs to be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York).