A market for organs

An investigation into organ trade in Chennai, India, by the Observer newspaper was published in February.1 The paper found 51 women who had sold one of their kidneys in the preceding six months. Chennai is near a constellation of villages that were affected by the 2005 tsunami and where the villagers have been forced to live in camps away from their boats, their main source of income. With the men unable to find work, many of the women have been forced to find other sources to earn a living. Some have resorted to selling their organs. One woman told a reporter that “she woke up twice during the operation and was sent home after only two days with a handful of sedatives.”

We spent two months with the Oxford Transplantation Centre last year, which gave an insight into the discrepancies in international health-especially in transplantation, where the illicit trade in organs has no borders. There, we heard more of such disturbing stories from experts who were familiar with ethical problems in organ trading.

Nancy Scheper-Hughes is a professor of medical anthropology at the University of California in Berkeley and is director of Organs Watch, a group devoted to investigating human rights abuses of transplant patients. One trail showed the international nature of what Scheper-Hughes coins “transplant tourism,” with a patient in New York travelling to Durban, South Africa, to receive a kidney from a slum dweller from Recife, Brazil. One donor crystallised the desperation of the people who are forced to sell one of their organs when he told Schaper-Hughes, “My mother had to sell her own flesh to keep us alive … and I didn't want …