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The Philippines said Monday that it had temporarily
suspended kidney transplants to foreigners, amid allegations that
poor Filipinos are being duped into selling vital organs for a
pittance.
Specialists—who are demanding
new national regulations on transplants—say poor, jobless and
illiterate people living in the greater Manila area have become
victims of an illegal kidney harvesting network.
“Right now, all
transplantations on foreign patients are deemed suspended,”
Health Undersecretary Alexander Padilla told a news conference.
“Kidney transplantation is not
part of medical tourism.”
The country’s vascular
transplant surgeons are observing a “moratorium” on kidney
transplants to foreign recipients while the government works with
doctors to craft new regulations, he added.
Padilla said that only less than
1,000 kidney transplants are performed in the Philippines annually.
But the Philippine Society of
Nephrology says the country is one of the world’s “hot spots”
for organ harvesting, with recipients in the West and the Middle
East paying up to $30,000 dollars for new kidneys.
It says a 10 percent cap on the
number of transplants to foreign recipients, which went into effect
in 2003, is regularly violated.
Between 2002 and 2005, the number
of kidney transplants to foreign patients from living, non-related
Filipino donors increased by 63 percent, according to the group’s
Vice-President Benita Padilla.
Padilla, a distant relative of
the health undersecretary, said these donors are mostly poor people
with little education who live in Manila’s slums, and many are
jobless.
The Society has also found
“clusters” of hundreds of donors, mostly farmers, and tricycle
drivers in towns southeast of Manila who received P112,000 from
those who received their kidney “donations”.
Selling or exporting human organs
is punishable in the Philippines by jail terms of at least 20 years
plus stiff fines.
But advocates say the organ
networks operate in a grey area where local or foreign patients
suffering from terminal renal failure get “donations” from
non-relatives.
The health undersecretary did not
rule out the possibility of a full ban on transplants to foreign
recipients, once the new guidelines are drafted.
--AFP
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