Illicit organ trafficking demeans humanity
Recent high-profile arrest of two government doctors and their accomplices from a private residence in Lahore allegedly for running an illegal kidney transplant racket highlights the irresistible lure that huge profits hold even for some in the healing profession. The ancient Hippocratic Oath has become a modern Hypocritical Vow. One of the arrested doctors is General Secretary of Young Doctors Association. The organisation’s choice of elected office bearers is obviously faulty, as a Vice President was also abetted by colleagues to escape from Anti-Corruption Department officials at Lahore’s Services Hospital in February.
FIA has lodged a case under Punjab Transplantation of Human Organs and Tissues Act (Amended) 2012 and 109 of Pakistan Penal Code, and a family whose son died during a transplant operation, carried out in primitive medical environment, has called for registration of a murder case. Freezing the doctors’ bank accounts and cancellation of their licenses will send the right message to others in callous organ commerce. No doubt many more such cases will surface, of chicanery both with donors and patients.
Human greed for vast profits has already made huge dents in the animal population, elephants for the ivory trade and rhinos and tigers for the alleged medicinal properties of their horns and internal organs. Though ‘guinea’ human beings are victims of the organ transplant trade, this sordid business is conducted on the good old market principle of supply and demand. A 2010 UN study found, ‘10,000 black market operations involving human organs a year’ of which 75 percent were of kidneys, with a new kidney ‘sold every hour’. That still constitutes a fraction of the demand, fueled by illnesses such as diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease. The losers are the poor exploited organ ‘amputees’, the winners rich transplant patients, traffickers’ gangs, doctors and middlemen.
Doctors aware of such shady activities must expose shameless colleagues, obsolete laws need to be updated and strictly enforced, more organ transplant hospitals provided, and availability enhanced, from living donors legally, or from executed criminals, of which the latter is however entering controversial, forbidden territory.
