Organ Trafficking

The first successful kidney transplant on a human was performed in 1954 between two identical twins at Boston's Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, an operation which subsequently received the Nobel Prize in medicine . Since then, transplants have been performed with increasing success rates and with organs that previously would not have been suitable for transplantation, as with deceased donor organs. The first reports on commercial trade in human organs date from the 1980s and concern the selling of kidneys by poverty stricken Indian citizens to foreign patients, especially from the Middle East. It was reported that around 80% of all kidneys that were procured for transplantation in Indian hospitals were transplanted into patients coming from the Gulf States, as well as Malaysia and Singapor A first scientific report appeared in the Lancet, and revealed that 131 kidney patients from the UAE and Oman had travelled to Bombay, together with their doctors, and were transplanted there with kidneys from local paid ‘donors’. The authors were not so much concerned about the commercialism, but more about the fact that many of the recipients had post operative complications This took place before the passage of the Indian Transplantation of Human Organs Act in 1994, which outlawed the selling and buying of human organs. But also after 1994 there are consistent reports of foreign patients travelling to India in search of a paid kidney donor: Goyal reported on over 300 citizens of Chennai who illicitly sold a kidney in the period 1994-2000