Go here for the full story:Organ Thiefs

But just a little excerpt for the link lazy:

About 100,000 nuyen?

Wow...That is excellent. I live in New York, that scares me.

Here I always thought kidneys were $30k each. Maybe it was $30k for the pair. Bleh.

I'd actually heard it going at 40k a few years ago somewhere in South America. Maybe everyone else caught on and flooded the market? supply and demand and all that? Everyone's like , "Hey, I don't need two kidneys! But I sure could use $30,000!"

I need two kidneys. But I do need $30k, and I can think of some people who don't need both (or any) kidneys.

and that makes you an entrepeneur, instead of a kidney whore

But I am most definitely not engaged in an ongoing criminal conspiracy.

/looks around

What?

Internal organs are quite problematic in terms of transplantation. While immunosuppressing drugs and better protocols have increased the viability of less-matched organs (there are literally hundreds of factors that need to be matched for a viable donor/patient combination), transplanting non-matched organs are simply not a reality at the present day. That, and the viability of the organ is indirectly proportional to the time it takes to transport the organ from the recently-deceased donor to the patient, regardless of matching. A cadaveric kidney, for the most common example, really only has a 24 hour window of viability under the best of conditions. By 2050, who knows what could happen? But right now in 2005, major organ transplants simply are too fragile and risky to be a viable black market for those purposes.

However, I'd like to point out that there is a great demand for body parts for educational purposes. Every year, the amount of cadavers used for medical school education shrinks just a little, and the demand for them is quite high. Some schools (most notably, Harvard) have eschewed cadaveric dissections entirely for gross anatomy. Pathology education is in constant need of example slides, preserved organs, and other accoutrements of teaching pathology, and these body parts have to come from somewhere.

Most of the stuff listed in that article concerns body parts that are not major organ transplantations. Human heart valves and skin allografts, for example. Tendons and ligaments typically aren't rejected, being mostly connective tissue. Because of the PVC pipe comments, and the fact that the main culprit is a dental surgeon, I'm thinking that the majority of the work done was extracting the bones and sending them for processing at tissue centers.

In other countries, particularly in East Asia and India, it is not unheard of for a rich person to offer money for someone to do a live donor transplant. I personally know a man who paid 70,000 dollars to a member of his church who was a match for a kidney. A while back, there was a guy who put up billboards and a website to try to find a directed donor kidney, and successfully had it transplanted. No money was exchanged between the two, allegedly. In our transplant service, there was a woman who received a kidney from a friend that she met on the Internet.

If you are interested in organs and cadavers, a good read is "Stiff" by Mary Roach (I think).

you're not.....

you might want to rethink that then. Free operators get torn up by the union. Especially in that line of work.

of course you were... there's a whole new edition of books coming out to pay for!

(still going strong in ISTAR Fortune . You and hahnsoo, always hafta be right. )

Wow hansoo, didn't know that you worked in the industry. Cool. And were you talking about the guy that needed a liver? (He did get one eventually, but died from complications later on, sadly).

For those that didn't read the story: This guy and his partner owned a funeral home. Allegiedly, they recovered tissues from pretty much anyone that passed thru the home, without gaining consent. They faked medical/social historys, had fake audio tapes of the consent, faked medical charts, the whole nine yards. The families probably never even knew what happened, as did the processing companies.

Hansoo's right on the money on that part: the processing companies do the actual work of, well, processing the recovered tissue into a usable, fairly inert form. Bones (usually replaced in the body for funeral by the aforementioned PVC piping), tendons, ligaments, veins, etc are sent off to be processed. That medical social history is important because of how some people live and die. The example used in the article is an IV drug user that died of an overdose; the medical records were changed to show that she died of cardiac arrest (which, while true, ain't the cause of death). No processing company would accept a donor with a recent history of IV drug use. I'm still wondering how they faked the lab results...

My organization actully works with one of the processing companies listed in the story. They've recalled the tissues recovered from the psudo-Tamanous people, and I'm surprised they didn't comment on the article.

Sorry for rambeling.

The more I hear what's happening in the medical field, the more I would rather just go see my vet. When do these future docs see the inside of a human first? And when do they get to poke around? At residency hospitals? Ick.
Makes me want to donate my poor abused body to science.

hahnsoo... what do you do for a living? You're not that kind of Mr. Johnson are you?

Let's just say if you need a body to be 'processed', he's the person to contact...