24.4.2007

Tissue at issue

If you lose your job, you can sell your home. If you lose your home, you can sell your possessions. If you lose your possessions, you can prostitute yourself. And if you lose everything else, you can sell one more thing: your organs.

Twice in the past few weeks, transplant experts from around the world have convened in Europe to discuss the emerging global market in human organs. Two maps presented at the meetings tell the story. One shows countries from which patients have traveled for organs in the past three years: Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, South Korea and Taiwan. The other shows countries from which organs have been sold: China, Colombia, Pakistan and the Philippines.

The numbers on the maps add up to thousands. According to the World Health Organization, the annual tally of international kidney transactions alone is about 6,000. The evidence includes reports from brokers and physicians, accounts from Indian villages, surveys of hospitals in Japan, government records in Singapore and scars in Egyptian slums. In Pakistan, 40 percent of people in some villages are turning up with only one kidney. Charts presented at the meetings show that the number of "donations" from unrelated Pakistanis is skyrocketing. Two-thirds of the people receiving these organs are foreigners. Data from the Philippines show the same thing.

The first successful organ transplant took place half a century ago. Since then diabetes, hypertension and other kidney-destroying diseases have spread. Antibiotics have improved, as have drugs that suppress the immune response to foreign organs. More people need transplants, and more can be saved by them. But donations haven't kept up with demand. An estimated 170,000 patients in the United States and Europe are on transplant waiting lists. More than 70,000 Americans are waiting for kidneys, and the list has grown by almost 5,000 per year. People are dying.

Instead of waiting, many patients have set out to recruit their own donors. They started with billboards, then moved to online locations such as MatchingDonors.com, JoeNeedsALiver.com and HelpMyGrandpa.com. Around the world, people have learned that their organs are assets. Peruvians, Ukrainians, Chinese hospitals and American prisoners advertise their innards. Last year, a South Korean playwright used his kidney as collateral for a loan.

Politicians have tried to rein in this market. The United States banned organ sales two decades ago. India did the same in 1994, and China followed last year. But when lives are at stake, rules get bent. To procure more organs, doctors have discarded brain-death standards, donor age limits and recipient health requirements. States have let transplant agencies put patients on life support, contrary to their living wills, to preserve their organs. If Congress revises its ban on organ sales, as some advocates hope, lawmakers in South Carolina plan to offer prisoners reduced sentences in exchange for organs or bone marrow.

If governments can't control wages or prices in a global economy, they certainly can't control the purchase of extended life. In the past two years, Israeli organ brokers shifted their business from Colombia to China for faster service. If China closes its doors, they can shift again. In Pakistan, kidneys already sell for a fraction of what Chinese hospitals charged. Brokers can compare organ prices from country to country, just like wheat and corn.

Already, bans on organ commerce are crumbling. Indians who lost their livelihood in the tsunami of 2004 sold their kidneys, ignoring the law. Bulgaria imposes stiff sentences on organ traders, but that didn't deter a local hospital from serving Israeli transplant tourists last year.

Nor did China's ban stop a Chinese hospital from offering a liver to a BBC correspondent. Last month a Korean newspaper reported that China's organ crackdown had simply raised the price of a Chinese kidney in South Korea.

Some reformers think they can solve the organ shortage and tame the market by legalizing sales. Their latest proposal, presented at one of the European meetings last week by Arthur Matas of the University of Minnesota, is a single-payer system for organs. It's half-libertarian and half-socialist. On the one hand, Matas says markets for eggs and sperm are harmless, kidney purchases can save countries money, and offering poor people cash for organs is no more coercive than offering them money to work in mines or join the army. On the other hand, he thinks the government can fix kidney prices and determine who gets them.

Good luck.

The key to reversing the organ market is to flood the market with free organs. If you haven't filled out a donor card, do it. now. Because if the dying can't get organs from the dead, they'll buy them from the living.

William Saletan, who covers science and technology for the online magazine Slate, wrote this article for the Washington Post.

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