Organ Trafficking: A Fast-Expanding Black Market
From Jane's Information Group:
As global demand for live transplants keeps growing, the shadowy organ trading business is rapidly expanding, dominated by unscrupulous brokers and facilitated by inadequate national legislations, widespread corrupt practices and a general lack of public awareness on the extent of the trade.
The illegal trade in body parts is largely dominated by kidneys because they are in greatest demand and they are the only major organs that can be wholly transplanted with relatively few risks for the living donor.
Organ trafficking accounts for around 10 per cent of the nearly 70,000 kidney transplants performed worldwide annually, although as many as 15,000 kidneys could be trafficked each year.
China, India, Pakistan, Egypt, Brazil, the Philippines, Moldova, and Romania are among the world's leading providers of trafficked organs. If China is known for harvesting and selling organs from executed prisoners, the other countries have been dealing essentially with living donors, becoming stakeholders in the fast-growing human trafficking web.
Trafficked organs are either sold domestically, or exported to be transplanted into patients from the US, Europe, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and especially Israel.
Ten years ago, organ trafficking was largely seen as a rumour. Since then a number of countries (Brazil, South Africa, India, Moldova) have taken decisive steps to go after the traffickers, criminalise the trade in human organs, or ban transplants from living donors. Nonetheless, this has come at the risk of driving the trade underground, or shifting it to other countries.
Arguing that laws and policies are insufficient to effectively curb organ trafficking, Organs Watch, COFS and other non-governmental organisations say it is essential for civil society to be actively engaged in this combat so organ trafficking is universally recognised as a medical human rights abuse and a "body tax on the poor".
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