With the recent shortage of organ donors, particularly for kidney patients worldwide, it is about time to create a regulated system of selling healthy organs for patients’ survival.
This was according to Dr. Arthur Matas, president of the American Society of Transplant Surgeons, proposing healthy individuals to sell one of their kidneys to help other patients to survive.
He added currently there is an alarming shortage of donated kidneys among 70,000 Americans waiting for a compatible kidney to replace their malfunctioning kidneys.
Most patients who also have diabetes, he noted, have to heavily rely on dialysis for several times in a week which in itself is a painful process of filtering their blood. This helps them to survive, but having a real kidney is incomparable to any temporary remedy.
In the early 1980’s, kidney patients need to wait for a few months before their failing kidneys can be replaced. But today, it takes five years or more or sometimes they die for the inability to find a compatible donor. Statistics showed that an estimated 5,000 patients die waiting.
Although morality issues remain as arguments in the selling of kidneys, Matas said that it is more dramatic to see patients dying on the process of dialysis. Doctors and other health professionals can’t do anything about it as the situation worsens every year.
He argued as other body fluids like sperm, eggs and blood are openly being traded; it may be very timely to accept the selling of vital organs, particularly kidneys, to help other ailing individuals to survive.
But critics remained deaf to the issue saying the system can be abused exploiting the poor. They cited what has happened in the past in Iran, Pakistan and the Philippines, where kidneys of poor men were sold like ‘cheap goods’ on the black market.
ABC News