LONDON: Worldwide trade in kidneys, that has also percolated to India’s commercial hub, Bombay, has been putting patients’ lives at task and creating huge profits for middlemen and doctors, a leading kidney expert has told the general medical council’s professional conduct committee here, PTI adds.
Robert Sells, a former president of the British Transplantation Society, told the committee there was tremendous risk of spreading infections between donors and recipients.
“I know of seven Saudi Arabians who went to Bombay to buy kidneys from poor peasants. Three died from aids within six months and two of them are ill with the disease,” Mr. Sells told the committee examining the charges of serious professional misconduct against three London doctors Raymond Crockett, a kidney expert, Michael Bewick, a leading transplant surgeon and Michael Joyce, a urologist.
The charges arise out of the transplant of kidneys from turks to crocketts private patients at the Human Wellington Hospital north west London between July and November 1988.
Sells, a surgeon at the Liverpool renal unit and one of the architects of guidelines drawn up in 1985 after disclosures of the exploitation of paid donors in India, said there was a need to protect the medical profession in Britain from a “disastrous, unethical and immoral” trade in Human organs.
Sells was questioned by the committee about an article by a Patel of the Municipal teaching hospital in Bombay which suggested that a different moral and ethical situation existed in countries such as India.
Article extracted from this publication >> December 15, 1989
