"You only need one kidney, anyway!"
INTERNATIONAL fessor at the University of Seoul, does not deny being one of the doctors who was charged with the delicate task of collecting foetuses for the Flow pharmaceutical laboratories (Rockville, Maryland), the world leader in supplying human tissues.
A profit rate of
SEVEN BABIES were saved in the nick of time on August 8 in
Paraguay from being sent to be dismembered to provide organs for a rapidly growing international medical business.
The affair was widely reported in the international press, and drew attention to a peculiar combination of scientific advances and the persistence of the free market and vast inequalities of income.
The following study of this area of capitalistic free enterprise was published in the September 1988 issue of Viva, the publication of La Vie Mutuelle, the federation of French mutual aid societies. The article is somewhat sensationalist, but clearly points to a growing problem.
M RAFFOUL
HE PRICE of human organs should be determined by demand, like any other product." The name of the person who made this statement is Aidan Vinig.
This Canadian businessman is undoubtedly the one who has best defined the basis of the traffic in human organs — "reestablish the rules of competition." Blood, an eye or a kidney are products to be bargained over in the same way as an emerald or a kilo of sweet potatoes.
In such trade, the third world or the fourth world once again turn out to offer inexhaustible supplies. This is especially true since, as a result of scientific progress, forms of traffic that were previously unthinkable have become business as usual.
Last May, for example, the University of
Wisconsin in the United States announced the discovery of "UW Solution." This makes it possible to preserve organs outside the human body for more than 24 hours in the case of kidneys and six to 26 hours for the liver. This also permits practical applications that the American professors undoubtedly never thought of.
At the same time, the disequilibrium between the supply of, and demand for, organs worldwide has continually increased.
Out of 17,000 patients waiting for a kidney transplant in Europe, barely 7,452 were able to have their operations in 1985. The recipients in the rich countries need organs;
the poor donors need money. The scientific skill exists. So why not sell a person, a child, or a foetus?
At the beginning of 1985, two employees at the Polyclinic morgue of the Vienna mu-
26 representative of a Prench beauty products nicipal hospital agreed to sell embryos to a
International Viewpoint #149 • October 17, 1988 firm at a price of 130 francs. Meninges
[spinal columnar membrane] and hypophyfrancs. The "representative," a reporter for ses [pituitary gland tissue] cost him 45 the Austrian magazine Ikarus exposed the business to the broad public.
Was this an exceptional case? According to the testimony of one of the employees arrested, German pharmaceutical firms had been buying foetal tissue from him for more than 14 years at a price of $4....
In the same year, on the other side of the
Atlantic, the Californian police discovered more than 500 dead foetuses preserved in formaldehyde stacked in a truck. They were going to a private plastic surgery clinic in Santa Monica. This discovery inevitably recalled another affair revealed after more than 10 years ago by the Washington
Post.
US Defense Department's kidney trade
In 1986, the paper that blew the Watergate scandal published an article claiming that between 1970 and 1976 the laboratories of the American Defense Department imported 12,000 pairs of kidneys of foetuses aged from three to eight months from South Korea. As incredible as it may be, this information was not new. Ten years before, Professor Wald, Nobel prize winner in medicine, tried to expose this traffic. Back in March 1976, Asahi Shimbun, the biggest Japanese daily, wrote: "a large quantity of kidneys of human foetuses — more than 20,000 — imported by the US from South Korea have been used for military research. " Mr. Lee Myong Bok, a pro-
6,000 per cent!
Since saline abortion could have damaged the tissues and killed the foetuses, the noble professor inflicted the most advanced type of Caesarian operation on South Korean expectant mothers under the pretext of
"complications." As early as 1969, Flow laboratories paid him $15 per pair of kidneys, a rate that he gradually raised to $30.
In a remarkable work by Rolande Girard devoted to this traffic, Professor Wald explains that from a pair of kidneys 6,000 tubes of tissue cultures were obtained, which were sold at $30 a piece to laboratories "including the laboratories of the Fort
Detrick [Maryland] military medical institute for research on infectious diseases."
According to some estimates, he adds, the number of seven to eight-month-old foetuses annually imported into the US from the entire world between 1970-80 was
80,000. Flow's profit rate was was 6,000
What could these kilos of fetal kidney tissue be for? Questioned by Rolande Girard,
Professor Steven Rose, director of the brain research institute at the British Open University, claimed to know nothing about the traffic in South Korean foetuses. But, nonetheless, he advanced the hypothesis of work on a chemical weapon intended for use in the European theater. He thought it was a nerve gas capable of killing in a few seconds through simple skin contact....
The other hypothesis is an "ethnic weapon" capable of killing Asians selectively without "harming" people of other races. True or false? It is hard to answer this question, especially since the director of the Fort Detrick Military Institute, where this type of work is continuing, preferred to maintain a troubling silence on this matter during a discussion with Rolande Girard for the French TFI TV channel.
To gather together the raw material necessary for their research, the United States naturally turned to a "friendly" third world country known for its high abortion rate. For the year 1970, the number of interrupted pregnancies approximated the birth rate. In 1978, deliberate abortions were three times more numerous than births. So, if we are to believe all the testimony provided by people involved in the traffic, the "land of liberty" caused foetuses to be dissected in a third world country in order "final solution" to be used against people of to perfect a biological weapon for a new the yellow race. The undersecretary of state in Washington was willing only to concede before the TFI cameras that this traffic "did exist up until 1977," but only in an attempt
October 17, 1988 • #149 International Viewpoint to isolate spontaneous diseases.
Up until today, the US State Department, through the intermediary of its diplomatic offices, indignantly denies the reports about work on an ethnic bomb. It points out that the "largely multi-ethnic composition of American society shows how ridiculous this claim is." Not a word about the "South Korean foetuses conduit" As if other more "noble" labors no doubt justified recourse
Since the revelation of the affair, South Korea has indeed stopped its macabre exports. "The market was taken over by Singapore, but I don't know anything more," Professor Wald says from Switzerland.
Flow, which has an office in France, has affiliates in 14 countries. Where do the laboratories get the raw material necessary to supply the demand on a world scale? Flow laboratories' chief of products in France, Hervé Gourgues is not very forthcoming on this question. In an interview given to Parents Magazine in 1966, he said: "The cells come from laboratories, most often American ones. I do not know how they
"But I see from your catalogue that you offer, for example, lungs of a masculine embryo of the Black race," the reporter "Now see here," Mr. Gourgues replied: "We are not offering the lungs of an embryo but cells extracted from the lungs of an embryo, which is a very different
Like many Haitians under the regime of dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier, François and Allie dreamed of going to North America. A Montréal Haitian they met by chance in a travel agency at the beginning of 1986 promised them $7,000 and false immigration papers for Canada if they each gave a
"Anyway, you have one too many," he told them.
From Port-au-Prince to
Miami
Landed in Miami without being told where they were, they were taken at night to a mysterious clinic and then separated. Allie, who does not speak a word of English, was abandoned without any money, without papers or baggage and with no address in the downtown area. A week later, she found Francois. He had been operated on the day before, and his scar was bleeding. He, of course, had neither money or immigration papers.
Despite the "advice" of doctors, François decided to alert the US police. Shortly afterward, a car ran him over on the sidewalk and sped away. He was killed on the spot. Many Haitians have had the same experience. More than 150 of them, according to an investigation carried out by two US journalists for the Pittsburgh Press, and which was published in the March 30, 1986, issue of the paper.
Few of the "volunteers" have received the promised money. The conduit formed by voodoo priests, doctors and traffickers leads to Miami, to Montréal and maybe Québec City, sometimes even Port-auPrince, the capital of Haiti. That is where Estelle, a 14-year-old girl from Cap Haitien, ended up. She was contacted by a medical team that asked her to participate in a research program at the Haiti National University in Port-au-Prince. She was promised a return ticket to the city and $20. When she woke up in the hospital, she had only one kidney left. The other one was to be sold for $13,000 in the United States.
"Our notions of death differ"
According to two Haitian doctors, at the beginning of the 1980s in Haiti at least two or three non-consenting donors a month were operated on without knowing what was happening. Some died, and 60 per cent of the survivors that these practitioners have been able to examine since suffered from grave post-operative infections.
"In Haiti, where the highest members of the government are implicated in one way or another, making any public statement would mean signing your own death warrant," the two doctors noted, explaining at they preferred to remain anonymous.
In April 1987, a team of doctors from the Brazilian university medical center in Taubate, near São Paulo was accused by Mr Kalume, the former director of the department of medical sciences at the university, of having "prematurely shortened" the sufferings of five comatose patients in order to take their organs, without asking authorization from their families. "Our notions of death differ," Mr. Kalume said ironically. He added with a certain sense of understatement: "Not everything was done to keep the patients alive."
The mother of a comatose teenager who subsequently died reports that the doctors had asked her permission to take corneas from her child, who "suffered from visual problems." When she refused, they took the corneas plus her son's kidneys and liver without informing her. Knowing that she was illiterate, they asked her to sign a paper giving her agreement. In total, the investigation cited seven suspect deaths, and 11 doctors will be charged. The profits from the sale of kidneys to rich clients of São Paulo clinics "were divided between the doctors and the clinic," one of the more indiscreet surgeons, Henrique Torrecillas,
Because of the enormous risks involved, everything would be a lot simpler if the donors came forward on their own. On August 2, 1981, in the "advertising section" of the big Brazilian weekly O Globo, an apparently innocent notice appeared. "Zinda Tolentino wants to sell one of her kidneys." Questioned by TV reporters, she explained calmly that she needed money urgently. In Brazil, where three quarters of the popula-
INTERNATIONAL tion live below the poverty line, she is not
In the following weeks, hundreds of similar ads appeared in the Brazilian papers. Roque, who is unemployed, wants to make the payments on his apartment and pay for
"They call me crazy," he says indignantly. "What is crazy is when your son cannot get an education. What is crazy is the cost of living today."
Doubtless, to assure respect for this "right," several businessmen have even tried to gain official status for this unspeakable trade. Seeing the 1974 floods in Bangladesh on TV and the thousands of "wasted" bodies, Dr. H. Barry Jacobs in Reston, Virginia, wrote in February 1983 to the Federal Food and Drug Administration, the body in charge of all health inspection, to get authorization to import organs and launch his little business - International Kidney Exchange Ltd. He offers $10,000 for a kidney taken from living person, who is to give written consent in full knowledge of what is involved. If the persons involved cannot read and write, their agreement will be recorded on tape.
No federal law bans such traffic
"Having only one kidney does not have a major effect on the health of the donor," the expert says. "The other takes over about 70% of the function of the missing kidney." In his defense, Dr. Jacobs notes that no federal law bans such traffic. And even if it did, Mr. Merryman of the American Association of Tissue Banks predicts that "at the end of the decade the trade will be so extensive that the law will not be able to prevent
Showing an admirable concern, some doctors are worried that only rich people can afford a kidney and that "companies are engaging in the organ business without taking precautions." Last year, Hajo Harms, a German businessmen resident in Aix-laChapelle, offered to buy kidneys in the third world, paying donors $5,000 and then selling them in West Germany.
Mr. Harms was universally condemned by his compatriots. "It is monstrous," it was said for example in the German Committee for Organ Transplants, "for well-off nations to profit from the poverty of developing
The project of Aidan Ving, the Canadian business man who advocates reestablishing the rules of free trade in the sale of organs, is even simpler. A broker will buy your organs while you are alive, promising not to take possession until your death. Like Dr. Faust, you will be asked only for a little signature at the bottom of the contract.
Is not evervone free, according to sacrosanct liberal law, to do what they want? In this case, the poor are free to sell themselves a piece at a time and to die by inches, while the rich are free to use this to extend
"Don't come home without Solidarnosc!"