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Organ Donation: Exploiting The Poor Human Organ Shortage

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122,542. That is the current amount of names on the national organ transplant list. Only about 6% of those people will actually go through a lifesaving organ transplantation within the next year (Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network, 2015) due to the short supply of organ donations. Every ten minutes, another person is placed on the waiting list, and every day 22 people on that list die before they ever receive a new organ (Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network, 2015). As a result, there is a very intense demand for human organs, but too little people are willing to donate them. The shortage of organs for transplant caused the emergence of organ trafficking which favors a wealthy minority of individuals and exploits the poor …show more content…

The desperation that rose as a result of the human organ shortage crisis led to the creation of an entire new business in the black market: transplant tourism. A similar term, called medical tourism, is defined as “the travel of residents of one country to another country for treatment” (Cohen, 2013). Like medical tourism, transplant tourism involves traveling as well, but with the motive of purchasing organs for transplant (Cohen, 2013). It is currently illegal in all countries—besides Iran, Singapore, and Saudi Arabia—to exchange human organs for money. Yet this particular black market still happens to thrive in many destination countries due to the government’s failure to monitor the issue or the absence of resources to detect its general occurrence. The parties involved in this business consist of three different categories: sellers, recipients, and brokers. The majority of sellers come from the poorest parts of Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India. The recipients come from the more affluent countries like the Middle East, south Asia, Europe, and North America. The brokers are the people running this particular black market and they reside in the countries where the illegal transplants occur: Istanbul, Cesenau, Moldova, Tel Aviv, and Manila—just to name a few (Cohen, …show more content…

So in the organ black market, a person exchanging his or her organs for money is called a “seller”. The average seller in transplant tourism is between the ages of 31-40 and are living in extreme poverty. In the perspective of the seller, there is another example of dire desperation. These people hardly make enough money to survive. In a research study conducted by Syed Naqvi, M.D., in 2006 219 sellers from Pakistan were surveyed. He asked them about their monthly incomes. These were the

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