The Lixia District Court in Jinan City, Shandong Province, sentenced on Friday to jail 16 people for up to five years for their involvement in the kidney black market trading.
Most of them are health professionals such as two doctors, a nurse and an anesthetist who secretly performed kidney transplant surgeries, BBC reported. The court ordered them to pay penalties from 10,000 to 40,000 yuan.
Kidney Trading Ring
They were part of a group that matched buyers and sellers of the organ through the internet. The defendants searched the internet for people selling their kidneys arranged for tests and matched the buyers and sellers, CRI English reported. The kidney surgeries were secretly done in Feicheng City.
Because of the secret nature of the kidney transplant surgeries, in July two Chinese men who underwent the procedure died because of infection. The kidney recipients, one a 55-year-old man from Hebei and the other a 43-year-old man from Liaoning, died of rabies. Their kidneys came from the corpse of a six-year-old boy who turned out to have encephalitis that was not diagnosed.
Poor Kidneys Donor
The boy came from a poor family in Guangxi. He had fever in May 13 which worsened after two days, and his mouth foamed on the third days. Ten days after, the boy died and his kidneys and cornea were harvested.
Because of organ donation shortage in China, the kidney black market in China flourished with transplant patients being made to pay at least 400,000 yuan ($57,000) to 600,000 yuan. However, the kidneys were purchased for 40,000 yuan, giving the middlemen a profit of 700 to 15,000 yuan for every surgery held.
Until 2015, China illegally harvested the kidneys from prisoners until the international community condemned the practice. With 0.6 donations for every one million people, China has one of the lowest kidney donation rates in the world. In contrast, Spain has 37 donations for every one million residents.