Organ harvesting rumors slammed - eNewsTree.com

HONG KONG -It cannot be true that between 60,000 and 100,000 organ transplants areperformed on the Chinese mainland yearly using organs taken from executedprisoners, prominent transplantation experts said on Thursday.

Speaking at news conference after a symposium of the 26th InternationalCongress of the Transplantation Society, held in Hong Kong, experts Jose RamonNunez Pena, medical officer of the World Health Organization, and MichaelMillis, vice-chairman for global surgery and director at the University ofChicago’s School of Medicine Transplant Center, dismissed the allegations —which were raised by Western critics of China as early as 2006 — asimplausible.

Pena, a transplant surgeon who has visited China often, said the claimednumber is equal to the transplant activity of the entire world and is practicallyimpossible.

Pena said that the WHO firmly and without reservation supports China’s newethics-based, transparent organ donor program, which must be free of corruptionand financial incentives.

Transparency is the best guard against rumors, he said, acknowledging thatChinahas taken many measures to ensure the fairness and traceability of the wholeorgan donation and distribution process.

“It is time to close the door to rumors and open the door to the facts,”Pena said. “Chinanow has joined the transplantation train along with the internationalcommunity. We are all in the same train because we share the same principlesand ethical practices.”

Rumors about “organ harvesting” were said to be false in 2006, after aninvestigation conducted by the United States Consulate General in Liaoning province. Thesource of the rumor was Falun Gong, an outlawed group on the Chinese mainland,which alleged that the organs of more than 6,000 practitioners had beenillegally extracted at Sujiatun Thrombosis Hospitalin Liaoning,it said.

Yet some people with political influence have made the opposite claim.Former Canadian lawmaker David Kilgour and lawyer David Matas wrote a report in2006 claiming that Chinahad retrieved organs from criminals.

University of Chicago’s Millis said years of silence on the subject has allowed lies to bepeddled. Harvesting organs from criminals does not happen in China, he said.

Former transplantation society president Francis Delmonico said onThursday that the authors of the critical report should be questioned about howthey acquired their data.

Huang Jiefu, director of China Organ Donation and TransplantationCommission, described the allegations as “nonsense” and “ridiculous”. He saidthat transplantation surgeries performed in China annually accounted for 8.5percent of the total number of transplantation surgeries worldwide.

Consumption of anti-rejection medications — which transplant patients musttake for life after surgery to prevent their immune systems from attacking theorgans — account for 8 percent of global consumption.

“The two numbers match, which is evidence that the speculation isgroundless,” Huang said. “Some organizations are just demonizing China in orderto fulfill their political purposes.”

The Human Organ Transplantation Regulation, a standardized legal frameworkfor organ transplantation, has been in effect in China since 2007.

During the symposium, Huang, the commission director, said, “China has andwill have zero tolerance for any violation of the country’s regulations inorgan donation and transplantation”.

He added that even though China’sorgan donation and transplantation program is in its infancy, the country willnot tolerate behavior such as retrieving organs from executed people.

Pena praised China’ssystem as it managed to bring more than 2,700 voluntary donations, which meansmore than 10,500 patients received transplants in 2015. And there was a rapidincrease of donation cases in the first half of this year. He said it is aclear demonstration that the system is fair.