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By Rommel C. Lontayao Reporter
The Department of Health, stung
by the alarming illegal trade of organs that mostly involves poor
donors, on Tuesday announced that organ transplants for foreign
patients will soon be banned in the country.
The Health department said the
total ban on transplants for foreigners was in keeping with an order
from President Gloria Arroyo.
The order that prohibits all
foreigners from accessing organs from Filipino donors “comes at a
time when the Philippine government faces the ethical and moral
imperative to protect Filipinos, particularly the poor, from the
black-market sale of internal organs,” Health Secretary Francisco
Duque 3rd said.
The new policy will make
permanent a temporary suspension of transplants to foreigners that
was implemented last month. But it will not include transplants from
living relatives, or organ transplants from the dead.
“The revised AO [Administrative
Order] sets the general guidelines and ethical principles whereby
the act of donation and conduct of transplantation using non-related
donors are managed and regulated,” Duque said.
According to the Philippine
Society of Nephrology, the Philippines is considered as a world
“hotspot for human organ trafficking.”
The Health department has
reported that a total of 473 kidney transplants from unrelated
living donors were carried out in 2006, while the number of
transplants from related donors was only 181. Its figures from 2002
showed that the disparity between the two was constantly increasing.
From 2002 to 2006, the department
noted a 62-percent increase in the number of foreign recipients of
organs from non-related donors.
Duque said that with the new
order, the government was just asserting its “mandate to protect
the poorest and most vulnerable sectors of our society adhering to
international ethical standards, which prohibit the international
trafficking and commercialization of human tissues and organs.”
“Organ donation is being
promoted only among well-informed, free-willing, and altruistic
donors without any monetary reward or improper and unethical
inducements,” he added.
Lawyer Nicolas Castro, director
of the Health department’s licensing and accreditation of health
facilities, said that under Section 10 of Republic Act 9208, or the
Anti-Trafficking in Persons Act, violators of the directive face a
penalty of imprisonment of 20 years and a fine of not less than P1
million but not more than P2 million. Foreigners found violating
this new policy will be immediately deported, Castro warned.
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