Hot Spots

Activity related to the organ trade around the world

Also see the photographic essay by Nancy Scheper-Hughes

Brazil

• Compensated Gifting - Softer forms of (living) organ sales;
  
  In the 1980s organ sales are flagrant. Organ sales advertised in newspapers. In the diario de Pernambuco in 1981 an advertisement placed by a Mr. Miguel Correia de Oliveira, age 30, read "I am willing to sell any organ of my body that is not vital to my survival and that could help save another person's life in exchange for an amount of money that will allow me to feed my family." (Patarra, Ivo. 1982 Fome no nordeste do Brasil. Sao Paulo" Editora Marco Zero)
  
  
• Illegal Cadaveric Body Part Sales;
  
  Organized crime rings deal in human body parts from hospitals and morgues. Brazil's leading newspaper, the Folha de Sao Pualo, carried several stories in 1997 of police investigations of "body Mafia" with connections to hospitals and emergency room staff, ambulance drivers, and local and state morgues that traded in blood, organs, and human tissues from cadavers. In one case, falsified death certificates were provided to conceal the identities of mutilated corpses in the Rio de Janeiro morgue. A senior physician attached to a large academic hospital in Sao Paulo states that the commerce in organs there in the late 1970s during the military dictatorship was rampant and "quasi-legal". Surgeons like himself, he charged, were ordered to produce quotas of "quality" organs and were protected from any legal actions by police cover-ups. In some cases full military police escort accompanied the ambulance so that organs would arrive quickly and safely.(Scheper-Hughes, "Global traffic in Human Organs")
  
  
• Prisoners Granted Release Time for Organ Donation;
  
  
• Allegations of Organ Theft;
  
  The case of the theft of the eyes of Olivio Oliveira, a 56-year-old mentally ill man living in a small town near Porto Alegre, has never been solved. The story first surfaced in local newspapers in November of 1995 received international attention. The case was investigated by doctors, surgeons, hospital administrators, police, and journalists. While some experts claimed that the man's eyes were pecked out by vultures or gnawed away by rats, others noted that they seemed to have been carefully, even surgically removed. (Scheper Hughes "Global Traffic in Human Organs" Current Anthropology Vol 41, Number 2, Aprill 2000) Laudiceia Cristina da Silva, a young receptionist in Sao Paulo, filed a complaint with the city government requesting a police investigation of the public hospital where in June 1997 one of her kidneys was removed without her knowledge or consent during a minor surgery to remove an ovarian cyst. Her loss of the kidney was discovered soon after the operation by her famly doctor during a routine follow-up examination. When confronted with the information, the hospital surgeon explained that the missing kidney had been embedded in the large ovarian cyst, a highly improbable medical narrative. (Scheper Hughes, "Global Traffic in Human Organs")
  
  
• Body Part Theft at Medical Schools/Police Mortuaries
  
  A police investigation of a local morgue in Sao Paul (in 199?) indicated that several thousand pituitary glands had been taken (without consent) from poor people's cadavers and sold to private medical firms in the United States, where they were used in the production of growth hormones. (Scheper Hughes, "Global Traffic in Human Organs") In the 1980s an anatomy professor at the Federal University of Pernambuco in Recife was prosecuted for having sold thousands of inner-ear parts taken from pauper cadavers to the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration for its space training and research programs.(Scheper-Hughes, "Global Traffic in Human Organs")
  
  
• Organ theft and political violence/military dictatorship
  
  During the military years, adults and children were kidnapped, and now it appears that their organs were sometimes appropriated as well. Organ transplant surgeries and organ sales reached a peak in Brazil in the later 1970s during the presidency of General Figueiredo. According to well-placed sources, during the later military dictatorship period a covert traffic in bodies, organs, and tissues taken from the despised social and political classes was supported by the military state. (Scheper Hughes, "Global Traffic in Human Organs")
  
  
• Corruption in Organ Waiting lists and Distribution
  
  Bribes in Rio and Sao Paulo enable people (especially foreigners) to move to the tops of waiting lists while poor people never come to the top. Mariana Ferreira of Sao Paulo stated that in December of 1997 that after being told he would need a cornea transplant he was reassured by the doctor: "I can refer you to some friends of mine at X Hospital. You will still need to register with the cornea waiting list, but if you have $3,000 cash you can cut through the list and be placed up front." (Scheper-Hughes). A kidney transplant activist in Sao Paulo showed us her files on the hundreds of ordinary citizens and candidates for kidney transplant who, despite medical exams and multiple referrals, have never been called to the top of any transplant list. A donor, Zulaide, with complications arising from her own recovery was rebuffed by doctors when she went to the private transplant clinic in Recife seeking follow-up medical attention.(Scheper-Hughes)