An American medical journal is warning that China, the second most prolific organ transplanting country in the world, might be harvesting organs from prisoners while they are still living as a means of execution.
While China’s government insists that all the organs harvested in the country come from voluntary donors, the nation has long been accused of extracting organs from executed political prisoners.
Now, the American Journal of Transplantation, which National Review notes is one of the world’s most respected medical publications, has published a paper explaining that Chinese doctors may be violating the so-called “dead donor rule,” ethical standards for organ transplanting that forbid harvesting organs from living donors.
“A core value in medical ethics is the principle of ‘do no harm,’ famously captured in the Hippocratic Oath. This principle motivates two widespread professional medical prohibitions: the dead donor rule (DDR), which forbids the procurement of vital transplant organs from living donors, and the injunction against physician participation in executions,” the paper, “Execution by Organ Procurement: Breaching the Dead Donor Rule in China,” explains.
The authors reviewed papers published by Chinese doctors between 1980 and 2015 and identified 71 in which appeared to indicate that organ removal had been the cause of death in the case of organ removal as there could have been no determination of “brain death.”
“The 71 papers we identify almost certainly involved breaches of the DDR because in each case the surgery, as described, precluded a legitimate determination of brain death, an essential part of which is the performance of the apnea test, which in turn necessitates an intubated and ventilated patient,” the paper reads.
There were a number of medical indications the researchers looked at which pointed to living and even in one case, ambulatory patients, which were consistent with eyewitness accounts from within China of organs being removed from living prisoners.
Chinese doctors, interestingly, stopped publishing papers in 2015, which the medical journal speculates could be due to a number of reasons, including human rights activists exposing China’s violation of the DDR in 2014.
Obscuring such practices would certainly be in line with the Chinese government’s overall modus operandi.
In the face of growing criticism of their treatment of the Uighur ethnic minority, members of whom are often cruelly treated, tortured, raped, beaten, and executed in concentration camps, the Chinese Communist Party fiercely denies wrongdoing and tends to sanction activists and politicians alike who criticize their actions.
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