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THE
country’s health secretary has signed an order aimed at
eradicating a thriving black market in kidney sales by
people desperate to do anything to ease the crush of
poverty.
Health
Secretary Francisco Duque said Wednesday the order,
which he signed two days earlier, called for the
creation of a government board to oversee kidney
donations and transplants, ensure proper care of donors
and make more transparent and ethical a disturbing
practice that has flourished in secrecy.
Kidney
trading in the Philippines, involving dirt-poor people
and prisoners who sell their organs for paltry sums to
syndicates catering mostly to foreign clients, has been
reported by the local media and reflects the depth of
the country’s poverty.
A TV
network once featured a
Manila
slum in which dozens of men sported abdominal scars
after giving up their kidneys.
The
order seeks to provide a more benevolent image to kidney
donations by prohibiting the payment of money as a
precondition. It says donations must be done “out of
selflessness and philanthropy” to save and ensure the
quality of life of the beneficiary.
“We want
to remove this black market,” Duque told The Associated
Press. “We want to protect our already poor countrymen
from abuse.”
Health
Undersecretary Alexander Padilla said the order, which
took more than two years to craft, was sought
specifically because of numerous reports of foreign
patients traveling to the
Philippines
in search of kidney donors.
“We
don’t want to be known as the kidney capital of the
world,” Padilla said.
A 1991
law only regulated transplants of kidneys and other
organs from brain-dead donors.
--AP |
