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Canadians travel to India for organ transplants

Ajit Jain
India Abroad Correspondent in Toronto

Canadian patients desperately needing transplants are travelling to India, China and the Philippines where they pay between US $50,000 and $145,000 for a kidney transplant, a practice condemned by the International Transplant Society and the World Health Organization, says a front-page report in the Globe and Mail.

Dr Jeffrey Zeltzman, a Toronto-based kidney specialist and director of St Michael Hospital's renal transplant programme, is quoted as saying that he examined a patient with a six-inch scar on his abdomen, who recently returned from India after a kidney transplant.

But to the doctor's amazement, an ultrasound revealed that there was no transplant and he was the victim of a con.

Zeltzman has neither revealed the name of the patient nor the name of the hospital in India.

The Toronto daily has detailed the case of Roger Kinnee, 55, from British Columbia, who suffered a stroke on the journey home recently from India after purchasing an organ from a 17-year-old Madras construction worker.

Kinnee is now in hospital.

Medical specialists say the best chance of obtaining a kidney is from a living donor. The operation, while major, has few complications if the person providing the organ is healthy.

Of the 1,010 single-kidney transplants performed in Canadian hospitals in 1999, 379 were from living donors. According to the Canadian Organ Replacement Register, spouses, family members and long-time friends are the best candidates, provided no money changes hands and they are properly screened.

According to this organisation, 536 Canadians died between 1997 and 1999 waiting for organ transplants.

The story in the daily actually relates to the transplant business activities of British Columbia-based Walter Klak, who has formed a partnership with a man in Shanghai. They charge US $5,000 for registering the names of people looking for transplants.

These people are then shipped to a hospital in Shanghai. To them China is the source for the "largest supply of organs".

Dr Zaltzman reportedly calls it "...like a black-market underground economy. We've had lots of patients who have gone. Some tell us and some don't tell us; they just come back with kidneys."

Buying and selling of organs is illegal in all provinces and territories in Canada, but it is a breach of a provincial regulation, not a criminal offence, and is subject to a maximum fine of Cdn$1,000 and six months in jail.

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