China Fights to Go Beyond Organs Harvested From Executed Prisoners

HONG KONG - A senior official with the Chinese Ministry of Health says the country must end its dependence on organs taken from executed prisoners even as it struggles to establish “an ethical and sustainable organ donation system.”

The official, Wang Haibo, said there is now a “consensus among China's transplant community that the new system will relinquish the reliance on organs from executed convicts.”

The national system, he said, in comments in a new World Health Organization bulletin, will start in the coming months as Chinese officials phase out “the old practice.”

The old practice hasn't been working, even with China leading the world by far in executions - as many as 4,000 a year, according to human rights groups. (The exact numbers are not disclosed by Beijing.)

Executions can hardly keep pace with the demand for organs, of course. According to official statistics, China now has around one million patients needing a kidney tran splant and another 300,000 awaiting livers. Fewer than 4,000 kidneys and 1,500 livers were transplanted last year.

Between 2003 and 2009, only 130 people in China signed up as organ donors, academic researchers found. As a result, two-thirds of all organs for transplant are still taken from executed prisoners.

From the Beijing Review:

Chinese customs call for people to be buried or cremated with the body intact. One die-hard superstition has it that if an organ is taken from a body after death, the person in question will be reborn with a handicap in that organ in his or her next life.

An investigation in 2004 by the British newspaper The Independent found a flourishing underground trade in organ sales and transplants in China, especially for Japanese patients. There was an uproar on the mainland the following year when the renowned actor Fu Biao received two liver transplants within a matter of months. Nevertheless, he died of liver cancer in August 2005.

And in 2006, a reporter from the BBC went to a public hospital in the city of Tianjin, ostensibly to arrange a liver transplant for his ailing father. The reporter said hospital officials told him a suitable liver could be available in three weeks.

Official talk about a national organ-donation system began in earnest in 2007 when a law was passed to ban the private, black-market sales of organs that had created trafficking rings that duped young or impoverished patients into having operations. Living organ donations are now statutorily limited to spouses, blood relations and people with discernible emotional or family connections.

The law also made it illegal to provide prisoners' organs to foreigners, colloquially known as “organ tourists” or “transplant tourists.”

“Nevertheless, the extreme shortage of transplant organs in the U.S. continues to make organ transplantation in China an appealing option for some patients with end-stage disease,” said an article in the American Journal of Bioethics. The article, from February 2010, is called “Transplant Tourism in China: A Tale of Two Transplants.”

A story earlier this year about organ scams in China said living donors were being paid an average of $4,000 for kidneys, which are then sold to recipients for nearly $32,000. Doctors from public hospitals, the article said, are involved in the trade.

A 17-year-old student from Anhui Province sold one of his kidneys last year for $3,500 through a middleman, then used the money to buy an iPad and an iPhone. (The middleman, in debt due to gambling losses, received $35,000 for finding the young donor online and organizing the surgery.)

And in March, according to news reports in China, a court in Beijing prosecuted a kidney-trafficking ring that arranged the sale of 51 kidneys worth $1.6 million.

A pilot program under the direction of the Red Cross Society of Chi na was announced in 2009, as my colleague Michael Wines reported, to create a donation system to “benefit patients regardless of social status and wealth,” according to Huang Jiefu, the vice minister of health.

“Transplants,” he said at the time, “should not be a privilege for the rich.”

The Red Cross said the pilot program - located in 16 regions - has yielded just 546 organs from 207 deceased donors. A further 15,379 people also registered as organ donors.

Mr. Wang, the director of the Ministry of Health's new donation system, said China would soon match the W.H.O. standard of conduct on organs and transplants.

“Although it took decades to establish a sophisticated national organ donation system in Western countries,” he said, “I am optimistic that China can leapfrog to success in a relatively short period of time given the combination of governmental support and international experience.”