Tuesday, 01.29.08

Gurgaon donors

Tom Hilton under a CC license

El Cheapo kidneys, get them while they're warm

In the grossest violation of the Hippocratic Oath since Mengele, a gang of surgeons in Gurgaon, India, allegedly rounded up beggars and day-laborers, drugged them, and sliced out their kidneys.  Other poor Indians surrendered their kidneys to the doctors for handfuls of cash. In all, the gang bought or stole as many as 500 organs in a nine-year medical crime-wave -- then installed them, for a price, in the renally-diseased bodies of rich Indians and foreigners. Leaving aside the surgery-at-gunpoint and the forcible anesthesia, two gruesome facts stand out.

1. Americans were paying for the kidneys of very poor people in a country with low public health standards.  Did they test these unconscious street urchins for hepatitis and kidney health?  In the US, fewer than one percent of dead donors' kidneys are useful; the rate for live donors is higher, but not 100%.  How desperate must these foreigners be to want the kidney of a drugged saddhu?
2. Is the problem that these beggars were not being paid enough?  India has experimented with kidney swaps -- if I can't give my wife a kidney, I'll give one to your wife, but only if you give yours to mine -- but like the US, India outlaws organ sales.  In the US we need over 70,000 kidneys, and we have fewer than 15,000.  A regulated market could get rid of the deficit.

Indian mendicants, if you're reading this: my wife doesn't have kidney failure, but if she did, I wish the law would permit me to pay you for your kidney, and force me to pay you enough to change your life as well as hers. — Graeme Wood

Filed Under: doctors, donation, health, human rights, India, kidney, markets, medicine, organs