The Chinese government has many strengths, but I don’t think that international PR is one of them. In a report released from the Chinese Health Ministry, and reported in their nationalized press last week, China announced it is working with the Red Cross to create a new nation wide system by which volunteers can donate their organs after death. Yay! [The entire world cheers and applauds China for its efforts] The report then goes on to mention that up to this point, about 65% of organ donors were executed prisoners. Boo! [Suddenly China doesn't have anyone to sit with at the lunch table]
No more harvesting criminals? China's gonna need more organs.
Yes, China finally confirmed that a huge percentage of its organs were harvested under dubious conditions. Reportedly one organ in ten went to organ tourists, though the government cracked down on organ tourism and Internet organ brokers in time for the Beijing Olympics. Organ trafficking is still a big problem, as we mentioned when discussing Britain’s approach to private organ sales. China faces an enormous hurdle when moving into a public organ donation system. There are about 1 million people waiting for organs, but only about 130 registered donors. (Yes, those are the correct numbers) Wouldn’t it be wonderful if a great portion of the necessary organs could be generated artificially?
As we’ve mentioned, researchers are making meaningful progress in creating reliable artificial organs, often by utilizing stem cells. China has already made important contributions in the use of stem cells, though some reports are misleading. We are years away from seeing these artificial creations transplanted into a human host, but that time table could undoubtedly be shortened if China threw its scientific weight towards reaching that goal. Honestly, I think that creating enough artificial organs may take less time than arranging a nation wide system of living and deceased donors. The US system of connecting donors to recipients is still developing, but took about 20 years to reach what we would recognize today.
Let’s look at China’s problem. Previously, 65% of all donations came from executed criminals. Amnesty International estimates that there were about 1700 such people in 2006. China won’t say how many there actually were, but they do say that these “donors” were optimized: they were tested thoroughly for compatibility and killed in a way that minimized organ damage. Counting corneas, kidneys, livers, lungs, etc, each person might be able to donate 6-12 organs. But that’s wishful thinking. Even with that 35% of non-criminal (and living) donors, only about 1% of those needing organs receive them each year.
In short, China needs 1 million, it has about 10,000. Under the old system of harvesting convicts, there’s no way China could match that need. Under the new system, about one Chinese citizen in every thousand would have to donate. The current US rate is about one in twenty thousand. Either China will have the highest rate of donation in the world, or they will need to find another source of organs.
Science! Science is the answer. Artificial organs may take years to perfect and produce on a mass scale, but so will ramping up a national Chinese donation system. Why not run both projects in parallel? Likewise, virtually every other country in the world is experiencing an “organ shortage”. Though few are in as bad a position at China, each nation could use more organs. You can never have enough organs, as the old saying goes. Already millions of dollars are spent in research for artificial ones, but stepping up that spending, dedicating more resources nationally and globally, may be the only successful long term solution.
Comments
IMO organ tourism is a great thing. Rich people need organs and poor people have something in their bodies that can make them (relatively) rich. Everyone wins. If I was a destitute person in India or China and giving away one of my kidneys could get me enough money to send my kids to school and buy a house I’d want that opportunity. Nobody should be discouraging it.
This is ridiculous that no mainstream news agencies are covering this. People are being tortured and killed each day and websites like cnn.com or msnbc.com don’t even have one article that aims to bring these issues to light. They’d rather run stories like “zebra escapes from local zoo” along with 10 min of home video cam footage of a man chasing a zebra around through his neighborhood. Wtf is wrong with them? The only explanation that I can think of is that all of the News Corp Rupert Murdoch owned media outlets aren’t trying to prevent public awareness about this in order to preserve america’s “Relation$” with china. Our media is on a fast track to becoming as censored as theirs… have you seen what their routers look like there? They actually have a built in “content filter” that is attached to the circuit (wireless internet circuit board pics). It’s just incomprehensible that the only word about this getting out is through pamphlets being passed around at colleges from escaped victims or on non-mainstream news sites such as this. At the rate we’re going, this could be happening in America right now and we would still have not one clue about what is going on.
@thetruthchina; Firstly, owe, reading that hurt my eyes. Secondly, the article never supports China’s old organ harvesting system, nor does it comment upon the quality of China’s judicial system; Because that wasn’t the point of the article, both those issues have been done to death in other media sources, this comment thread is not really the place for such a debate. The point of the article, seeing that it needs to be demarcated so explicitly, is to support a plausibly superior, in both a practicle and ethical sense, method of organ provision now that the ‘bad old’ Chinese system has been dissolved.
@thetruthchina; Firstly, owe, reading that hurt my eyes. Secondly, the article never supports China’s old organ harvesting system, nor does it comment upon the quality of China’s judicial system; Because that wasn’t the point of the article, both those issues have been done to death in other media sources, this comment thread is not really the place for such a debate. The point of the article, seeing that it needs to be demarcated so explicitly, is to support a plausibly superior, in both a practicle and ethical sense, method of organ provision now that the ‘bad old’ Chinese system has been dissolved.
u people so ignorant dont you know most poepel that are criminal in china that are innocent the government system get innocent that protest them to thrown to jail , so much of the organ are from innocenct people and they died
u people so ignorant dont you know most poepel that are criminal in china that are innocent the government system get innocent that protest them to thrown to jail , so much of the organ are from innocenct people and they died
It makes sense to throw their weight behind organ synthesis – after all, they’re an export economy, and currently demand for cheap plastic shit is at a low. Medical demand? Very high.
It makes sense to throw their weight behind organ synthesis – after all, they’re an export economy, and currently demand for cheap plastic shit is at a low. Medical demand? Very high.
Yeah, they use only Falun Gong practitioners now.
Yeah, they use only Falun Gong practitioners now.
If any country in the world can obtain enough “willing volunteers”, China is probably the one to to do it. In a country with so much control over its population, a dictate that ensures all healthy organs are harvested from anyone who dies is quite possible. Coming from a country that was freely able to extract organs from its executed prisoners, this does not seem like much of a leap.
If any country in the world can obtain enough “willing volunteers”, China is probably the one to to do it. In a country with so much control over its population, a dictate that ensures all healthy organs are harvested from anyone who dies is quite possible. Coming from a country that was freely able to extract organs from its executed prisoners, this does not seem like much of a leap.