GESTIÓN EN SALUD PÚBLICA: BioEdge: Indian husband steals wife’s kidney without her knowledge or consent

sábado, 17 de febrero de 2018

BioEdge: Indian husband steals wife’s kidney without her knowledge or consent

BioEdge: Indian husband steals wife’s kidney without her knowledge or consent

Bioedge

Indian husband steals wife’s kidney without her knowledge or consent

by Michael Cook | 16 Feb 2018 |

One of the more bizarre stories of the murky work of organ trafficking comes from Kolkata. About two years ago, Rita Sarkar, 28, felt a sharp pain in her abdomen. Her husband took her to a clinic where she quickly had an appendicectomy. But the pain persisted. Her husband refused to take her to see a doctor and told to speak with no one about her operation.

Finally her father’s relatives whisked her away to another clinic. An investigation showed that one of her kidneys had been removed and that other was infected.

Sarkar’s husband was arrested this week and confessed that he had sold the kidney to a to a businessman in the Indian state of Chhattisgarh.

The husband’s justification was that Sarkar’s family had not paid a big enough dowry – although they were married in 2005. “He and his family tortured me during the past 12 years of marriage for dowry and when my family failed to meet their demands, they sold my kidney,” she told the local press. Dowries have been banned in India since 1961, but the practice persists.

According to the report in the Washington Post, “the Voluntary Health Association of India has estimated that about 2,000 Indians sell a kidney every year.”

Saturday, February 17, 2018

Last year the London Telegraph ran a travel article about Belgium, “10 reasons why Belgium is not as boring as you think”. A bit patronising, right?

Personally, I’d never call a country which has dared to legalise euthanasia boring. Anything but. This is a defiant poke in the eye to hundreds of years of Western civilisation. Whether you agree with Belgium’s regime of legalised euthanasia or not, it is a wildly exciting experiment in disrupting established social norms.

The latest news is that a whistleblower has accused the country’s euthanasia commission of breaking the law, muzzling dissent, and packing the commission with euthanasia practitioners. In other countries this would be called corruption. The whistleblower's letter to the Belgian Parliament is a searing indictment of a respected institution. You would think that the Belgian media would be baying for blood.

Nope. It was an American news agency, Associated Press, which broke the story. As far as I can see, it has been reported around the world, but not in Belgium. It’s a funny kind of journalism which ignores such a big story. Perhaps the media there believes that Belgium really is as boring as you think. Or perhaps they are in the pocket of the euthanasia lobby.