Houston Chronicle: China's death row fueling liver transplant biz?

May 03, 2006

In 2004, I reported on a Houston man, Todd Krampitz, with advanced liver cancer. His tumor was larger than a specified size, so transplant rules deemed him a poor candidate and placed him low on the waiting list. That's because it was unlikely he would survive his cancer even if he got a transplant. The organs are too precious to go to those who won't see long-term benefit from them.

So his family rented billboards, asking for a liver. Through a rule called "directed donation" a donor family somewhere out there gave Todd their loved one's liver. One could say he skipped ahead of the line, or he may have gotten a liver that otherwise would not have been donated. Anyway, as expected, he died seven months later from liver cancer.

Which brings me to Eric de Leon's story. De Leon, who lives in California, has liver cancer and he, too, was considered ineligible for transplant. He started a blog, and on it you glimpse the tragedy of his situation. De Leon has small children; Krampitz was a newlywed.

But De Leon took a different route: He flew to Shanghai and paid $110,000 for a transplant. The liver he received in March came from a 20-year-old, doctors told him.

A story in the San Francisco Chronicle raises some creepy issues. Basically, China's death penalty is the foundation for its organ transplant program, some say.

The report questions whether anyone obtained meaningful or voluntary consent from the prisoners or their relatives before the organs were harvested.

So far, watchdogs haven't been able to determine how many transplants Chinese doctors have conducted on foreign patients because the Chinese government does not release such figures.

The human rights group Amnesty International estimated in 2004 that at least 3,400 people were executed in China and 6,000 sentenced to death.... Amnesty has repeatedly reported the harvesting of organs from executed prisoners and called for the Chinese government to forbid the practice if prisoners haven't given free and informed consent.

Adherents of Falun Gong, the spiritual movement banned in China, have accused the government of harvesting organs from thousands of the movement's followers in Liaoning province, charges that the U.S. State Department has urged the Chinese government to investigate.

De Leon's blog, Transplant Tales, has drawn a storm of comments, such as this one, "A number of Chinese hospitals are offering organs to Western patients in under a week (suggesting that donors are being selected to order)."

Other comments are from those with advanced liver cancer who want to know how he did it -- so they can get a transplant in China, too.

Here's the going rate provided by one company: A kidney transplant at China International costs $62,000, a liver $98,000 to $130,000, a lung transplant $150,000 to $170,000 and a new heart $130,000 to $160,000.

What do you think?

Source http://blogs.chron.com/medblog/archives/2006/05/latest_form_of_1.html