Scholars Rap China For Killing Prisoners To Harvest Their Organs

China has violated two core values of medical ethics regarding organ transplants, according to an article published on Monday in the American Journal of Transplantation – the leading scientific journal in the world on transplants, David Stavrou reported for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

Photo Insert: The Chinese have allegedly violated the prohibition on the participation of physicians in the executions of prisoners.

Analyzing data between 1980 and 2015, the researchers concluded that the Chinese have routinely violated the Dead Donor Rule, which prohibits harvesting an essential organ from a living person and prohibits causing the death of donors to harvest their organ.

The 71 papers proving that organs were harvested before the subject’s death were spread out over a period of 35 years and came from 35 different hospitals in 33 cities and 15 provinces

The authors, Mathew Robertson, a doctoral student in politics and international relations at the Australian National University in Canberra, and Prof. Jacob Lavee, also claim that the Chinese have violated the prohibition on the participation of physicians in the executions of prisoners.

Lavee is a medical advisor on risk management for Sheba Medical Center and a member of the board of ethics of the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation. He set up and managed Sheba’s heart transplantation unit and served as the president of the Israeli Transplantation Society.

For their research, Lavee and Robertson scoured a database of over 120,000 papers in Chinese that deal with organ transplants. They filtered out 2,800 articles dealing with heart and lung transplants. They searched in the text for sentences that describe intubation into the windpipe of the deceased that was conducted only after the determination of brain death or after the beginning of an operation to procure organs.

“Finding such a description proves that a test to determine cessation of breathing was not conducted,” Lavee said. It indicates that “the patient was not ventilated until that moment and breathed independently until the beginning of the organ harvesting operation and thus was not brain dead,” Lavee noted.

We do know from unofficial sources that there is lucrative transplant tourism to China from Persian Gulf countries, among them Saudi Arabia, he added.

“In 310 papers, we found sentences that describe problems in determining the death of the donor. There was no clear and unequivocal testimony that ventilation was commenced after the start of the operation. But in 71 other papers, we found clear and unequivocal proof that brain death was not determined before the organ harvesting operation commenced.”

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