Keen demand fuels global trade in body parts

By Tan Ee Lyn

HONG KONG (Reuters) - Paul Lee got his liver from an executed Chinese prisoner; Karam in Egypt bought a kidney for his sister for $5,300; in Istanbul Hakan is holding out for $30,700 for one of his kidneys.

They are not so unusual: a dire shortage of donated organs in rich countries is sending foreigners with end-stage illnesses to poorer places like China, Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, Colombia and the Philippines to buy a new lease of life.

Lee, a 53-year-old chief subway technician in Hong Kong, was diagnosed with liver cancer in January 2005 but doctors denied him a transplant because they feared the tumor would spread.

A friend told him about a transplant hospital in China's north eastern Tianjin city and he signed up for a place. That April, he paid 260,000 yuan (US$34,380) for a transplant -- surgery that saved his life.

"The hospital has connections with a lot of prisons," Lee told Reuters. "Mine came from an executed prisoner from Heilongjiang. I thank the donor deeply."

The World Health Organisation estimates that 21,000 liver transplants are carried out annually, but medical experts put annual worldwide demand at least 90,000.

Demand for kidneys also exceeds supply, and that has given rise to organ trafficking and a black market for rich people and "transplant tourists" who travel to poor countries to buy body parts from people with few other routes to a better living.

A donor in South Africa receives $700 for a kidney while in the United States the fee -- not paid to donors -- is around $30,000, according to WHO estimates. A lack of transparency and little protection for donors has spurred calls by international bodies to crack down on, or at least regulate, the trade.

But even where the trade is banned, laws are often muddled or laced with loopholes, which are sometimes defended by vested interests.

EASIER

And the unregulated route is much less complicated for the recipient. Any transplant procedure involving a living donor carries risks for the donor -- especially for liver transplants which involve removing part of the donor's liver.

The complications can include bleeding, infection, even death.

In the transplant trade, the recipient need not worry about, for example, exposing a living relative to that risk.

"It is cheaper and your next of kin is not taking the risk and you don't have to care for someone you don't know. Once you pay, it is discarded in a way, it is dispensable," said Luc Noel, a Geneva-based coordinator for Clinical Procedures at the World Health Organisation.

China recently banned the sale of human organs and restricted transplants for foreigners, saying it must first meet demand at home for 2 million organs a year.