Trading Flesh Around the Globe

A ghoulish notion: people so poor that they sell some of their body parts to survive. But for scores of brokers who buy and sell human organs in Asia, Latin America and Europe, that theme from a late-night horror movie is merely a matter of supply and demand. There are thousands more patients in need of kidneys, corneas, skin grafts and other human tissue than donors; therefore, big money can be made on a thriving black market in human flesh.

In India, the going rate for a kidney from a live donor is $1,500; for a cornea, $4,000; for a patch of skin, $50. Two centers of the thriving kidney trade are Bombay, where private clinics cater to Indians and a foreign clientele dominated by wealthy Arabs, and Madras, a center for patients from Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand. Renal patients in India and Pakistan who cannot find a relative to donate a kidney are permitted to buy newspaper advertisements offering living donors up to $4,300 for the organ. Mohammad Aqeel, a poor Karachi tailor who recently sold one of his kidneys for $2,600, said he needed the money "for the marriage of two daughters and paying off of debts."

In India, Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe, young people advertise organs for sale, sometimes to pay for college educations. In Hong Kong a businessman named Tsui Fung circulated a letter to doctors in March offering to serve as middleman between patients seeking kidney transplants and a Chinese military hospital in Nanjing that performs the operation. The letter said the kidneys would come from live "volunteers," implying that they would be paid donors. The fee for the kidney, the operation and round-trip airfare: $12,800. With that, the Hong Kong government moved to put into effect legislation that would ban all buying and selling of organs. The Hong Kong case underscored already widespread concern about the 2,000 or so transplants performed annually in the People's Republic, where many of the harvested kidneys come from executed prisoners.

Elsewhere, authorities are working to bring the flesh market under control. Britain passed a law in 1989 forbidding organ sales after a Turk complained that he had been lured to Britain with a job offer, sent to a hospital under a false pretext, then anesthetized and relieved of one of his kidneys. Germany is pushing through a similar law, spurred in part by an abortive offer from a Soviet medical institute to provide German patients with Russian kidneys for a fee of $68,570 -- payable in deutsche marks.