BMJ  2007;334:502-505 (10 March), doi:10.1136/bmj.39141.493148.94

Feature

Iranian organ donation

Kidneys on demand

BMJ

Did Iran eliminate its waiting list for kidney transplants? And if so, where are the kidneys coming from? Anne Griffin investigates

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

When a Toronto based transplant surgeon and bioethicist wrote last year that Iran had eliminated its waiting list for kidneys, the lay press listened. Abdullah Daar made the claim in NatureClinical Practice Nephrology while arguing for a regulated system of living kidney sales.¹ An approving editorial in the Economist shortly after declared: "Governments should let people trade kidneys, not convict them for it."²

But not everyone agrees that the claim is true. "It depends on how you define waiting list," Behrooz Broumand, a past president of the Iranian Society of Nephrology, told the BMJ. Javaad

Zargooshi, a urologist at the Kermanshah University of Medical Sciences, goes further. "The elimination of the waiting list has never occurred in Iran. It is merely a Goebblesian lie repeated over and over by the commercial programme's spin doctors," he said.

Dr Daar backs his claim with a reference to a paper by . . . [Full text of this article]

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