WASHINGTON—Transplant surgeons in China are awash in human organs.
Some complain of working 24-hour shifts, performing back-to-back
transplant surgeries. Others ensure they’ve got spare organs available,
freshly harvested—just in case. Some hospitals can source organs within
just hours, while others report having two, three, or four backup
organs, in case the first organ fails.
All this has been taking place in China for over a decade, with no
voluntary organ donation system and only thousands of executed
prisoners—what China says is its official organ source. In phone calls,
Chinese doctors have said the real source of organs is a state secret.
Meanwhile, practitioners of Falun Gong have disappeared in large
numbers, and many have reported being blood tested while in custody.
Jump to Infographic
An unprecedented report
by a small team of relentless investigators published on June 22
documents in sometimes astonishing detail the ecosystem of hundreds of
Chinese hospitals and transplant facilities that have been operating
quietly in China since around 2000.
Collectively, these facilities had the capacity to perform between
1.5 and 2.5 million transplants over the last 16 years, according to the
report. The authors suspect the actual figure falls between 60,000 and
100,000 transplants per year since 2000.
“The ultimate conclusion of this update, and indeed our previous
work, is that China has engaged in the mass killing of innocents,” said
co-author David Matas upon the report’s launch at the National Press
Club in Washington on June 22.
The study, titled “Bloody Harvest/The Slaughter: An Update,” builds on the previous work of the authors on the topic. Released shortly after the passage of an official censure
of organ harvesting in China by the U.S. House of Representatives, the
research poses an explosive question: Has large-scale medical genocide
been taking place in China?
Big Profits
The People’s Liberation Army General Hospital, whose main task is to
provide health care for top Communist Party and military officials, is
among the most advanced and well-equipped hospitals in China. The number
of organ transplants it performs is a military secret—but by the early
2000s, its clinical division, the 309 Hospital, was making most of its
money from them.
“In recent years, the transplant center has been the primary
profitable health care unit, with gross income of 30 million yuan in
2006 to 230 million in 2010—a growth of nearly eightfold in five years,”
its website states. That’s a jump from US$4.5 million to US$34 million.
The PLA General Hospital wasn’t the only health care institution to
stumble across this lucrative business opportunity. The Daping Hospital
in Chongqing, affiliated with the Third Military Medical University,
also managed to boost its revenue from
36 million yuan in the late 1990s, when it had just started
performing transplants, to nearly 1 billion in 2009—a growth of 25
times.
Even Huang Jiefu, China’s spokesman on organ transplantation, stated
to the respected business publication Caijing in 2005: “There’s a trend
of organ transplantation becoming a tool for hospitals to make money.”
How these remarkable feats were achieved in so short a time across
China, when there was no voluntary organ donation system, when the
number of death row prisoners was decreasing, and where the waiting
times for patients expecting transplants could sometimes be measured in
weeks, days, or even hours, is the subject of the new 817-page
(including citations) report.
Parts of the
report, drawing from whistle blower testimonies and Chinese medical
papers, state that some donors may not have even been dead when their
organs were removed.
“This is extremely difficult research to have done,” said Li Huige, a
professor at the medical center of the Johannes Gutenberg University
Mainz in Germany, and a member of the Doctors Against Forced Organ
Harvesting advisory board, after reviewing the study.
The report contains a forensic tally of all known organ
transplantation centers in China—over 700 of them—and counts their bed
numbers, utilization rates, surgical staff, training programs, new
infrastructure, recipient waiting times, advertised transplant numbers,
use of anti-rejection drugs, and more. The authors, armed with this
data, estimated the total number of transplants performed. The number
stretches past 1 million.
This conclusion, though, is only half the story.
“It’s a mammoth system. Each hospital has so many doctors, nurses,
and surgeons. That in itself isn’t a problem. China’s a big country,”
said Dr. Li, in a telephone interview. “But where did all the organs
come from?”
Captive Bodies
Organs for transplant can’t be removed from dead bodies and simply
placed into storage until needed; they need to be recovered before or
soon after death, and then quickly implanted into a new host. The often
desperate timing and logistics around this process make organ matching
in most countries a complex field, with waiting lists and dedicated
teams who encourage family members of accident victims to donate organs.
0 comments:
Post a Comment