China Accelerates Plan to Phase Out Prisoner Organ Harvesting
The Wall Street Journal, 3 November 2012
China plans to launch a national voluntary organ donation system early next year in a bid to fulfill growing transplant lists and phase out its long-criticized reliance on organs from executed prisoners.
The country’s Ministry of Health has commissioned the Red Cross Society of China to run the nation’s organ donation system and will work with the organization to ensure that all organ procurement and transplantation is done legally, said Wang Haibo, director of the China Organ Transplant Response System Research Center of the Ministry of Health, in an interview featured in the November edition of a World Health Organization journal called the Bulletin (pdf).
Health officials have also tapped the University of Hong Kong to develop the China Organ Transplant Response System, a computer system to maintain requests according to “urgency, compatibility and patient need,” Mr. Wang said in the WHO interview.
The development of an organ donation program marks a move to overhaul of a system that has for years relied on prisoners and organ traffickers to serve people in need of transplants. “While we cannot deny the execut¬ed prisoner’s right to donate organs, an organ transplantation system relying on death-row prisoners’ organs is not ethical or sustainable,” the WHO quoted Mr. Wang as saying.
Officials in the world’s most populous country have before conceded that China has depended for many years on executed prisoners as its main source of organ supply for ailing citizens. Human-rights groups have criticized the practice, saying that organ harvesting is often forced and influences the speed and number of China’s executions.
China doesn’t publicly report execution figures, but San Francisco-based human-rights group Dui Hua Foundation estimates that 4,000 prisoners were executed in 2011. That compares to 43 executions in the U.S. last year, according to Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit organization Death Penalty Information Center.
Mr. Wang’s announcement moves up the projected date for the new national system. In March, Huang Jiefu, China’s vice minister of health, announced that China would abolish the practice of using prisoner organs within the next five years.
The demand for transplants in China is growing, said Mr. Wang in the report. An estimated 1.5 million people in China are in need of organ transplants annually, while only 10,000 receive them, according to government statistics.
In the U.S. in 2009, 14,632 organs were donated, while the transplant wait list had 104,898 patients, according to data from the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network and the Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients.
China’s new voluntary system will run up against a number of obstacles, including the lack of legislation defining brain death, Mr. Wang said in the interview. “Death is not merely an isolated natural process,” Mr. Wang was quoted as saying. “It has culture and societal aspects that are unique to each society, which must be respected by that society’s organ do¬nation system.” Clarity about when a person is legally dead is needed before his or her organs are procured, he said in the report.
In addition, the success of a voluntary system depends on the Ministry of Health’s ability to change public perception of organ donation, the report cited Mr. Wang as saying. Due to religious beliefs and cultural traditions, many in China believe the integrity of a body should be maintained after death, Mr. Wang said, noting that the same belief systems also encourage life-saving.
Mr. Wang said in the interview health officials will launch public awareness campaigns. Health experts are also discussing the need for a social support system for disadvantaged donors and recipient families, he added.
The Red Cross program will be an extension of a pilot program for voluntary donation that it and China’s Ministry of Health launched in 2010 and that has been tested in 16 of China’s mainland cities and provinces.