China Moves to Stop Transplants of Organs After Executions
Posted: Fri Mar 23, 2012 9:47 pm
China Moves to Stop Transplants of Organs After Executions
By KEITH BRADSHER
Published: March 23, 2012
HONG KONG — China said on Friday that it planned to end within three to five years the practice of transplanting organs from executed prisoners, a step that would address what for decades has been one of the country’s darkest and most criticized human rights issues.
A wide range of official media ran apparently coordinated articles describing the merits of voluntary organ donations by the public instead. They cited Huang Jiefu, the vice minister of health, as telling a conference in the city of Hangzhou on Thursday about the plan to stop harvesting organs after executions.
“The pledge to abolish organ donations from condemned prisoners represents the resolve of the government,” he said, according to the official Xinhua news agency.
Dr. Huang did not acknowledge any ethical issues involved in taking organs from prisoners. Instead, he raised a medical issue, saying that the rates of fungal infection and bacterial infection in organs taken from executed prisoners were often very high, so the long-term survival rates of organ transplant recipients in China was consistently below the survival rates of recipients in other countries.
Nicholas Bequelin, a senior researcher in Hong Kong for Human Rights Watch, welcomed the policy announcement, which the human rights group has campaigned for since 1994. But he noted that Mr. Huang, who turns 66 this year, is about to retire, along with most of the country’s top political leadership.
That means the next generation of political leaders and health ministry officials will have to deal with the thorny problem of how to obtain enough voluntary organ donations to offset the country’s heavy dependence now on prisoners.
“It’s not clear to me the government is going to have the political will to fulfill this promise,” Mr. Bequelin said.
A health ministry official in Beijing declined to take questions about the new policy over the phone, asking that questions be submitted by fax instead. There was no immediate reply to a fax.
For many years, China resisted even passing national legislation for organ donation or for establishing when brain death had occurred. The worry was that particularly in poorer areas of China or areas with lax or particularly corrupt law enforcement, doctors would be tempted to act prematurely in declaring a person to be brain dead.
China’s cabinet, the State Council, issued regulations in 2007 for voluntary organ donations. But it has struggled to popularize the practice. Traditional Chinese customs call for people to be buried or cremated with their organs intact.
People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, said that China has 150 people who need organ transplants for each organ that is donated voluntarily. The newspaper did not say how much of the difference is made up from executed prisoners.
China has 300,000 patients with end-stage liver diseases, but in the first 11 weeks of this year there were only 546 transplants of livers and other major organs, the newspaper said, adding that, “The majority of the sufferers die while waiting agonizingly to receive them.”
The Dui Hua Foundation a human rights group in San Francisco estimated in December that China executes 4,000 people a year. That was down from 8,000 a year in 2007, the year that the Supreme People’s Court regained the authority to conduct a final review of any death sentences approved by lower courts, but the current total is still more than the rest of the world combined.
The Chinese government does not release official statistics on executions. Official media reports of executions appear to suggest that the death penalty is used heavily against drug traffickers and gangsters, with rare cases of government officials and business executives who are executed in extreme cases of corruption or endangering public safety, such as during recent scandals over faulty pharmaceuticals and contaminated milk.
Dr. Darren Mann, a consulting surgeon with experience in organ transplants in Hong Kong, a former British colony that was returned to Chinese rule in 1997 but retains an autonomous health care system, said that people with histories of intravenous drug use are likely to be overrepresented in prison populations and would be more likely to have fungal and bacterial infections. Organ transplant recipients are treated with powerful immune suppression drugs to prevent them from rejecting transplanted organs, but these drugs also leave the recipients very vulnerable to any infections that the donor’s immune system may have been keeping in check.
“The pledge to abolish organ donations from condemned prisoners represents the resolve of the government,” he said, according to the official Xinhua news agency.
Dr. Huang did not acknowledge any ethical issues involved in taking organs from prisoners. Instead, he raised a medical issue, saying that the rates of fungal and bacterial infection in organs taken from executed inmates were often high, so the long-term survival rates of organ transplant recipients in China was consistently below that of other countries.
Nicholas Bequelin, a senior researcher in Hong Kong for Human Rights Watch, welcomed the policy announcement, which the human rights group has campaigned for since 1994. But he noted that Mr. Huang, who turns 66 this year, is about to retire, along with most of the country’s top political leadership.
That means the next generation of political leaders and health ministry officials will have to deal with the thorny problem of how to obtain enough organ donations voluntarily to offset the country’s heavy dependence now on prisoners.
“It’s not clear to me the government is going to have the political will to fulfill this promise,” Mr. Bequelin said.
A health ministry official in Beijing declined to take questions about the new policy over the phone, asking that questions be submitted by fax instead. There was no immediate reply to a fax.
For many years, China resisted even passing national legislation for organ donation or for establishing when brain death occurs. The worry was that in poorer areas of China or areas with lax or particularly corrupt law enforcement, doctors would be tempted to act prematurely in declaring a person to be brain dead.
China’s cabinet, the State Council, issued regulations in 2007 for voluntary organ donations. But it has struggled to popularize the practice. Traditional Chinese customs call for people to be buried or cremated with their organs intact.
People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, said that China has 150 people who need organ transplants for every organ that is donated voluntarily. The newspaper did not say how much of the difference is made up from executed prisoners.
China has 300,000 patients with end-stage liver diseases, but in the first 11 weeks of this year there were only 546 transplants of livers and other major organs, the newspaper said, adding that “the majority of the sufferers die while waiting agonizingly to receive them.”
The Dui Hua Foundation, a human rights group in San Francisco, estimated in December that China executes 4,000 people a year. While that is still more than the rest of the world combined, it is down from the 8,000 executed in 2007, the year the Supreme People’s Court regained the authority to conduct a final review of any death sentences approved by lower courts.
The Chinese government does not release statistics on executions. Official news media reports appear to suggest that the death penalty is used heavily against drug traffickers and gangsters, and rarely for government officials and business executives in extreme cases of corruption or endangering public safety, like during recent scandals over faulty pharmaceuticals and contaminated milk.
Dr. Darren Mann, a consulting surgeon with experience in organ transplants in Hong Kong, which retained an autonomous health care system after the British returned the territory to Chinese rule in 1997, said that people with histories of intravenous drug use are likely to be overrepresented in prison populations and would be more likely to have fungal and bacterial infections. Organ transplant recipients are treated with powerful immune suppression drugs to prevent them from rejecting transplanted organs, but these drugs also leave the recipients highly vulnerable to any infections that the donor’s immune system may have been keeping in check.
“Many of the transplant units on the mainland are very well organized,” Dr. Mann said. “They take pride in their work, so they would like to have internationally comparable outcomes.”
Dr. Huang is himself a surgeon and has served as director of a hospital for hepatic surgery, as president of one of the country’s top medical schools and as vice president of the Chinese Medical Association, according to China Vitae, an online database of biographical information on Chinese officials.
Human rights groups have long criticized organ transplant procedures in mainland China for not following the World Health Organization’s recommendation that organs only be taken from people who are brain dead. China allows organ harvests from people whose hearts have stopped.
“You can definitely imagine situations where the heart stops beating but the brain is not cognitively dead and they start removing organs — corneas have to be removed very quickly, for example,” Mr. Bequelin said.
Another concern has been whether prisoners and their families give informed consent, without inappropriate pressure from prison officials, for the use of organs. Families of executed prisoners sometimes complain that no one gave permission but they were given back bodies that were sewn up after the removal of various organs; Chinese prison officials have contended that these prisoners may have been the subject of autopsies.
China only started setting up a system last year asking people who apply for a driver’s license whether they want to donate their organs in the event of death. And in February 2011, China’s legislature adopted changes to the country’s criminal code to specifically ban the forced removal of organs or any removal of organs from juveniles, and a spate of recent prosecutions in mainland China indicates that the black market in organs is still a problem.
Dr. Huang said this month that as long as the demand for organs far outstrips supply, it would be hard to stop the black market.
By KEITH BRADSHER
Published: March 23, 2012
HONG KONG — China said on Friday that it planned to end within three to five years the practice of transplanting organs from executed prisoners, a step that would address what for decades has been one of the country’s darkest and most criticized human rights issues.
A wide range of official media ran apparently coordinated articles describing the merits of voluntary organ donations by the public instead. They cited Huang Jiefu, the vice minister of health, as telling a conference in the city of Hangzhou on Thursday about the plan to stop harvesting organs after executions.
“The pledge to abolish organ donations from condemned prisoners represents the resolve of the government,” he said, according to the official Xinhua news agency.
Dr. Huang did not acknowledge any ethical issues involved in taking organs from prisoners. Instead, he raised a medical issue, saying that the rates of fungal infection and bacterial infection in organs taken from executed prisoners were often very high, so the long-term survival rates of organ transplant recipients in China was consistently below the survival rates of recipients in other countries.
Nicholas Bequelin, a senior researcher in Hong Kong for Human Rights Watch, welcomed the policy announcement, which the human rights group has campaigned for since 1994. But he noted that Mr. Huang, who turns 66 this year, is about to retire, along with most of the country’s top political leadership.
That means the next generation of political leaders and health ministry officials will have to deal with the thorny problem of how to obtain enough voluntary organ donations to offset the country’s heavy dependence now on prisoners.
“It’s not clear to me the government is going to have the political will to fulfill this promise,” Mr. Bequelin said.
A health ministry official in Beijing declined to take questions about the new policy over the phone, asking that questions be submitted by fax instead. There was no immediate reply to a fax.
For many years, China resisted even passing national legislation for organ donation or for establishing when brain death had occurred. The worry was that particularly in poorer areas of China or areas with lax or particularly corrupt law enforcement, doctors would be tempted to act prematurely in declaring a person to be brain dead.
China’s cabinet, the State Council, issued regulations in 2007 for voluntary organ donations. But it has struggled to popularize the practice. Traditional Chinese customs call for people to be buried or cremated with their organs intact.
People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, said that China has 150 people who need organ transplants for each organ that is donated voluntarily. The newspaper did not say how much of the difference is made up from executed prisoners.
China has 300,000 patients with end-stage liver diseases, but in the first 11 weeks of this year there were only 546 transplants of livers and other major organs, the newspaper said, adding that, “The majority of the sufferers die while waiting agonizingly to receive them.”
The Dui Hua Foundation a human rights group in San Francisco estimated in December that China executes 4,000 people a year. That was down from 8,000 a year in 2007, the year that the Supreme People’s Court regained the authority to conduct a final review of any death sentences approved by lower courts, but the current total is still more than the rest of the world combined.
The Chinese government does not release official statistics on executions. Official media reports of executions appear to suggest that the death penalty is used heavily against drug traffickers and gangsters, with rare cases of government officials and business executives who are executed in extreme cases of corruption or endangering public safety, such as during recent scandals over faulty pharmaceuticals and contaminated milk.
Dr. Darren Mann, a consulting surgeon with experience in organ transplants in Hong Kong, a former British colony that was returned to Chinese rule in 1997 but retains an autonomous health care system, said that people with histories of intravenous drug use are likely to be overrepresented in prison populations and would be more likely to have fungal and bacterial infections. Organ transplant recipients are treated with powerful immune suppression drugs to prevent them from rejecting transplanted organs, but these drugs also leave the recipients very vulnerable to any infections that the donor’s immune system may have been keeping in check.
“The pledge to abolish organ donations from condemned prisoners represents the resolve of the government,” he said, according to the official Xinhua news agency.
Dr. Huang did not acknowledge any ethical issues involved in taking organs from prisoners. Instead, he raised a medical issue, saying that the rates of fungal and bacterial infection in organs taken from executed inmates were often high, so the long-term survival rates of organ transplant recipients in China was consistently below that of other countries.
Nicholas Bequelin, a senior researcher in Hong Kong for Human Rights Watch, welcomed the policy announcement, which the human rights group has campaigned for since 1994. But he noted that Mr. Huang, who turns 66 this year, is about to retire, along with most of the country’s top political leadership.
That means the next generation of political leaders and health ministry officials will have to deal with the thorny problem of how to obtain enough organ donations voluntarily to offset the country’s heavy dependence now on prisoners.
“It’s not clear to me the government is going to have the political will to fulfill this promise,” Mr. Bequelin said.
A health ministry official in Beijing declined to take questions about the new policy over the phone, asking that questions be submitted by fax instead. There was no immediate reply to a fax.
For many years, China resisted even passing national legislation for organ donation or for establishing when brain death occurs. The worry was that in poorer areas of China or areas with lax or particularly corrupt law enforcement, doctors would be tempted to act prematurely in declaring a person to be brain dead.
China’s cabinet, the State Council, issued regulations in 2007 for voluntary organ donations. But it has struggled to popularize the practice. Traditional Chinese customs call for people to be buried or cremated with their organs intact.
People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, said that China has 150 people who need organ transplants for every organ that is donated voluntarily. The newspaper did not say how much of the difference is made up from executed prisoners.
China has 300,000 patients with end-stage liver diseases, but in the first 11 weeks of this year there were only 546 transplants of livers and other major organs, the newspaper said, adding that “the majority of the sufferers die while waiting agonizingly to receive them.”
The Dui Hua Foundation, a human rights group in San Francisco, estimated in December that China executes 4,000 people a year. While that is still more than the rest of the world combined, it is down from the 8,000 executed in 2007, the year the Supreme People’s Court regained the authority to conduct a final review of any death sentences approved by lower courts.
The Chinese government does not release statistics on executions. Official news media reports appear to suggest that the death penalty is used heavily against drug traffickers and gangsters, and rarely for government officials and business executives in extreme cases of corruption or endangering public safety, like during recent scandals over faulty pharmaceuticals and contaminated milk.
Dr. Darren Mann, a consulting surgeon with experience in organ transplants in Hong Kong, which retained an autonomous health care system after the British returned the territory to Chinese rule in 1997, said that people with histories of intravenous drug use are likely to be overrepresented in prison populations and would be more likely to have fungal and bacterial infections. Organ transplant recipients are treated with powerful immune suppression drugs to prevent them from rejecting transplanted organs, but these drugs also leave the recipients highly vulnerable to any infections that the donor’s immune system may have been keeping in check.
“Many of the transplant units on the mainland are very well organized,” Dr. Mann said. “They take pride in their work, so they would like to have internationally comparable outcomes.”
Dr. Huang is himself a surgeon and has served as director of a hospital for hepatic surgery, as president of one of the country’s top medical schools and as vice president of the Chinese Medical Association, according to China Vitae, an online database of biographical information on Chinese officials.
Human rights groups have long criticized organ transplant procedures in mainland China for not following the World Health Organization’s recommendation that organs only be taken from people who are brain dead. China allows organ harvests from people whose hearts have stopped.
“You can definitely imagine situations where the heart stops beating but the brain is not cognitively dead and they start removing organs — corneas have to be removed very quickly, for example,” Mr. Bequelin said.
Another concern has been whether prisoners and their families give informed consent, without inappropriate pressure from prison officials, for the use of organs. Families of executed prisoners sometimes complain that no one gave permission but they were given back bodies that were sewn up after the removal of various organs; Chinese prison officials have contended that these prisoners may have been the subject of autopsies.
China only started setting up a system last year asking people who apply for a driver’s license whether they want to donate their organs in the event of death. And in February 2011, China’s legislature adopted changes to the country’s criminal code to specifically ban the forced removal of organs or any removal of organs from juveniles, and a spate of recent prosecutions in mainland China indicates that the black market in organs is still a problem.
Dr. Huang said this month that as long as the demand for organs far outstrips supply, it would be hard to stop the black market.