Organ transplant progress ‘but violations still exist’
Print Edition
CHINA is making progress in eliminating transplants using organs from executed prisoners, but violations still exist and offenders will be punished severely, the director of Beijing’s transplant program said yesterday.
“In China, organ donations from civilians and from prisoners cannot co-exist,” Dr Huang Jeifu told a Vatican conference bringing together nearly 80 doctors, law enforcement officials and representatives of health and non-government organizations.
“In my governmental organization there is zero tolerance,” he told reporters. “However, China is a big country, with 1.3 billion people, so sure, definitely, there is some violation of the law. If there is some violation of the law it will be severely punished.”
On Monday, Huang acknowledged that reforms to China’s transplant program have been slow and “very difficult.”
“From January 1, 2015, organ donation from voluntary civilian organ donors has become the only legitimate source of organ transplantations,” he said in an interview at China’s embassy to Italy.
China has one of the lowest rates of organ donation in the world, because of ingrained cultural attitudes and a legal requirement that family members give consent before organs are donated, even if a person had expressed a desire to donate. Even the donation system’s advocates say it needs hundreds of additional hospitals and doctors.
Huang said the number of voluntary donors increased 50 percent from 2015 to 4,080 last year, and he was “very optimistic” China would outpace the US in number of organ donors in five years. But China still needed help.
“That’s why we have come to the Vatican,” he said. “We have come to learn as well as to tell what is happening in China.”
The conference heard that patients were flocking to countries with lax regulations and cheap rates, including Egypt, India and Mexico, for everything from kidneys to corneas.
Huang proposed the creation of a “global task force” headed by the World Health Organization to crack down on the trade.
It’s unclear how effective such a WHO task force would be, given that the UN agency is reliant on countries to provide health information and statistics and rarely collects or independently verifies data provided by governments.
Huang said he is the highest-ranking Chinese official to attend a Vatican event, as a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. He stressed he was attending as a surgeon and medical expert — not necessarily as a diplomatic emissary.
China’s foreign ministry downplayed the significance of his participation. A spokesman said: “As far as I understand it, it shouldn’t have anything to do with China-Vatican relations.”
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