The kidney trade thrives

The kidney trade is growing ...

• The village of the kidneys - Nepali Times: A village near Kathmandu is the "Kidney Bank".
• Desperate Americans Buy Kidneys From Peru Poor in Fatal Trade - Bloomberg: "An American man had promised to give Picado, a 23-year-old high school dropout who worked as a construction laborer, a job and an apartment in New York if he’d donate one of his kidneys. He jumped at the deal, his mother says."
• NK defector in legal dispute over organ transplantation
• For Chinese, kidney donation is a click away - Features - Al Jazeera English
• Blood & Treasure: redundant organs: The youth and motivation (iPad) of the donor made this more prominent.

Bloomberg has had the best recent coverage of the organ trade. A long and slightly rambling article provides important background ...

Desperate Americans Buy Kidneys From Peru Poor in Fatal Trade - Bloomberg

... Every year, about 5,000 gravely ill people from countries including the U.S., Israel and Saudi Arabia pay others to donate an organ, says Francis Delmonico, a Harvard Medical School professor and surgeon. The practice is illegal in every country except Iran, Delmonico says.

Affluent, often desperately ill patients travel to countries such as Egypt, Peru and the Philippines, where poor people sell them their organs. In Latin America, the transplants are usually arranged by unlicensed brokers. They’re performed -- for fees -- by accredited surgeons, some of whom have trained at the world’s leading medical schools.

The global demand for organs far exceeds the available supply. In the U.S., 110,693 people are on waiting lists for organs, and fewer than 15,000 donors are found annually.

Americans who go abroad for illicit transplants can contract infections or HIV from unhealthy donors, posing a public health threat when they return, Delmonico says...

... Medical tourism company MedToGo LLC, based in Tempe, Arizona, says it will offer kidney transplants in Mexico and Costa Rica for about $50,000, a fifth of the cost in the U.S....

... “The poor have become a spare-parts bank for the well-to- do,” says University of California, Berkeley, anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes, who specializes in organ trafficking.

The Peruvian National Prosecutor’s Office is investigating 61 transplants in seven of Lima’s top hospitals since 2004, documents in the case show. Peraldo is one of 150 brokers, doctors, nurses and others under investigation, says Jesus Asencios, the prosecutor leading the probe....

Note the key feature of MedToGo is not their cost savings, it's that they procure kidneys in ways that circumvent, and perhaps violate, US, Costa Rican and Mexican law.

If the trade cannot be stopped, then it must be regulated. If a country decides it wants an organ trade, they can set a fixed rate that's paid every donor, regardless of whether the recipient is local or foreign. They can tax foreign transplants so that every foreign transplant pays for two local transplants.