GESTIÓN EN SALUD PÚBLICA: BioEdge: Allegations of organ harvesting in China persist

domingo, 2 de junio de 2019

BioEdge: Allegations of organ harvesting in China persist

BioEdge: Allegations of organ harvesting in China persist

Bioedge

Allegations of organ harvesting in China persist

by Michael Cook | 2 Jun 2019 |

The presence of at least 1 million Muslim Uighurs in “re-education” camps in Xinjiang Province is China’s best-known human rights abuse at the moment. But allegations of organ harvesting have not gone away.

Last year the the China Organ Harvest Research Center (COHRC) published a 340 page report with credible allegations about forced organ donation by political prisoners. (The introduction was written by a leading American bioethicist, Art Caplan.) China, it reported, acknowledges between 10-15,000 transplants a year, but the true figure must be far greater. The meagre number from voluntary donation and from executed prisoners cannot the source of all the organs. The COHRC believes that political prisoners, especially from the banned sect Falun Gong, are being killed for the organs.

The government, of course, denies this.

In an interview with Bitter Winter, an Italian online magazine about religious freedom and human rights in China, Germany-based pharmacologist Huige Li, updated the allegations.

Recent investigations by South Korean journalists in 2017, by BBC and others in 2018 reveal that the waiting time for organs in China remains in the range of days to weeks. Such an organ on-demand system is only possible with a large living organ pool. This means that the state-sanctioned organs crime is still running, and without Office 610 [the government agency for dealing with Falun Gong] and its successors, this is not possible...
The Chinese government claimed that before 2010, organs for transplantation came mainly from executed prisoners sentenced to death. Yet the number of death-row executions, even the highest estimated number, is too low to explain the number of the performed transplants. The number of transplantations has even continued to grow after 2007, when official executions declined. Therefore, the majority of organs don’t come from prisoners sentenced to death, but from extrajudicial killings of prisoners of conscience without legally sentenced to death...
The organ crime in China is different from that in any other countries. The short waiting time for organs doesn’t occur just in one or two hospitals here and there, but in almost all hospitals of the country: it is not at single time points, but consistent and constant from the 2000s to today. There must be a system behind it. “Private” criminal groups cannot supply such a high number of organs realizing an organ on-demand system. It is only possible with the support of the state.
The total number of foreign patients receiving organ transplants in China (the so-called transplant tourism) in 2006 was reported to be more than 11,000. Therefore, the real volume of transplants (those for foreign and inland patients combined) is very likely in the range of tens of thousands each year, with the majority of organs coming from Falun Gong practitioners.

Michael Cook is editor of BioEdge

An interesting group within the American pro-life movement is African-Americans who oppose abortion. The Rev Clenard Childress Jr, for instance, is a New Jersey pastor who runs a website called Black Genocide. Groups like his highlight the fact that African-American women account for a third of abortions in the US.

This might have been remained a factoid about the US abortion wars, but it was unexpectedly placed on centre stage this week with the Supreme Court's decision in Box v. Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky. Justice Clarence Thomas, the only African-American on the bench, was seething with anger when he reflected on the fate of black babies (see our story below):

abortion in the United States is also marked by a considerable racial disparity. The reported nationwide abortion ratio— the number of abortions per 1,000 live births—among black women is nearly 3.5 times the ratio for white women. And there are areas of New York City in which black children are more likely to be aborted than they are to be born alive—and are up to eight times more likely to be aborted than white children in the same area.

Journalists who bothered to report his remarks shook their heads and described him as loopy. He's not. That abortion has a disproportionate impact on the poor and disenfranchised is a blot on American society. For a touching comment on this, check out this rap song from a group called Flipsyde, Happy Birthday.