generalspeaking

Another Story Altogether

China's immense population of over 1.3-billion people and growing, also represents a population that has a need of transplant organs. No fewer than one and a half million every year. This number required for the population of China alone. And then, of course, there is the booming business enterprise of organ transplants offered to foreigners who wish to take advantage of China's organ-transplant business.

For it is a highly-remunerative business, aligned with tourism. For those people whose medical condition is so desperate and they so willing to undertake risks because they really have nothing left to lose on the gamble that an organ transplant taking place in China will offer them one last gasping chance at life in replacing their own failed organs, it is a bargain. One they don't wish to quibble with.

By asking, for example, anything so picky as where the organs come from. There are many who claim that the outlawed Falun Gong are a source of organs for transplant, although the government denies this. On the other hand, most organs are harvested from prisoners. And commonly enough the Falun Gong are prisoners.

China currently executes roughly five thousand of its people annually, for capital crimes.

From this source livers, kidneys, eyes and other organs are harvested for implantation in people whose own organs have failed. People tend to choose, if they can, the transplant of any handy organ over death. Most people might find the very prospect of routinely harvesting organs from those consigned to death, fairly unpalatable.

All the more so in a country where Confucian traditions hold to the belief that the body be buried in an intact state. Still, in the free enterprise system that China has become, the illegal, independent theft of organs from people who have been kidnapped, or people desperate to earn money, or even young people through forced organ removal, has been officially banned.

Banned officially, but still an ongoing, profitable operation. Why should enterprising individuals who have little regard for basic human rights not proceed with a profitable business in organ-snatching when the government itself does so? The death penalty perhaps handed out far more frequently than required, to ensure an ongoing harvest of needed organs.

According to government sources "Condemned inmates have high rates of fungal and bacterial infections. Therefore, the long-term survival rates for people with transplanted organs in China are always below those of people in other countries." And so, Chinese authorities have decided to attempt a truly voluntary organ donation program.

Planning, finally to phase out organ harvesting from executed prisoners over the next three to five years. And to inculcate in ordinary Chinese an understanding of how critical it is that people opt to donate their organs after death for the betterment of society as a whole. Convincing them that though the tradition is to be buried intact, a new tradition should supercede that.

Even blood donation is uncommon in China due to the traditional cultural prohibition holding that the body must be whole, as it is sacred. Whether the government will realize success with this initiative, much less be able to close down the large kidney trafficking networks and those of Internet middlemen, surgeons and secret operating rooms, is another story altogether.

Labels: China, Crime, Health, Heritage, Human Relations, Human Rights

posted by Pieface @ Sunday, March 25, 2012