Today's Topics:
Get your fresh organs here!
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Date: Sun, 16 Jun 91 21:53:26 EST
From: Nathan Charles Crowell <bigal@wpi.wpi.edu>
Message-Id: <9106170153.AA24058@wpi.WPI.EDU>
To: subgenius@mc.lcs.mit.edu
Subject: Get your fresh organs here!
Cc: bigal@wpi.wpi.edu
The con wants your body parts.
They'll even buy 'em from you!
No, this isn't the flesh-shop from "Neuromancer", it's
worse - it's real!
Let me edify:
(From big,huge,ultra-pink Time Magazine, June 17, 1991)
"Trading Flesh Around The Globe"
A ghoulish notion: people so poor that they sell
some of their body parts to survive. But for scores
of brokers who buy and sell human organs in Asia,
Latin America, and Europe, that theme from a late-
night horror movie is merely of supply and demand.
There are thousands more patients in need of kidneys,
corneas, skin grafts and other human tissue than donors;
therefore, big money can be made on a thriving black
market in human flesh.
In India, the going rate for a kidney from a live
donor is $1,500; for a cornea, $4,000; for a patch of
skin, $50. Two centers of the thriving kidney trade
are Bombay, where private clinics cater to Indians and
a foreign clientele dominated by wealthy Arabs, and
Madras, a center for patients from Malaysia, Singapore,
and Thailand. Renal patients in India and Pakistan who
cannot find a relative to donate a kidney are permitted
to buy newspaper advertisements offering living donors
up to $4,300 for the organ. Mohammad Aqeel, a poor Karachi
tailor who recently sold one of his kidneys for $2,600,
said he needed the money "for the marriage of his two
daughters and paying off of debts."
In India, Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe,
young people advertise organs for sale, sometimes to pay
for college educations. In Hong Kong a businessman named
Tsui Fung circulated a letter to doctors in March offering
to serve as middleman between patients seeking kidney
transplants and a Chinese military hospital in Nanjing that
performs the operation. The letter said the kidneys would
come from live "volunteers," implying that they would be
paid donors. The fee for the kidney, the operation and
round-trip airfare: $12,800. With that, the Hong Kong
government moved to put into effect legislation that would
ban all buying and selling of organs. The Hong Kong case
underscored already widespread concern about the 2,000 or
so transplants performed annually in the People's Republic,
where many of the harvested kidneys come from executed
prisoners.
Elsewhere, authorities are working to bring the flesh
market under control. Britain passed a law in 1989 for-
bidding organ sales after a Turk complained that he had been
lured to Britain with a job offer, sent to a hospital under
false pretext, then anesthetized and relieved of one of his
kidneys. Germany is pushing through a similar law, spurred
in part by an abortive offer from a Soviet medical institute
to porvide German patients with Russian kidneys for a fee of
$68,750 - payable in deutsche marks.
Need I say more?
Big Al, aka Nate
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End of Subgenius Digest
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