China Was Accused Of Killing Political Prisoners For Their Organs

Researching on the transplantation of human organs must comply with the rigorous standards. In case the donors as death row inmates or other people don’t allow, researchers can’t harvest their organs. Besides, before each study is published on any research journal, it must gain approval from international ethics committees.

However, according to a recent report, researchers from China have transplanted a large number of illegal organs, which are supposed to take from a part of the prisoners, into patients. It is worth mentioning here that these prisoners used to have a conflict concerning religion or politics with the authorities of this nation.

On February 06, the BMJ Open published a paper saying that the researchers from the US and Australia revealed that they had analyzed up to 445 studies which many peer-reviewed journals in English published during the period from January 2000 to April 2017. All of these studies were related to China’s transplanting hearts, lungs, and livers. The total number of organs reportedly reached 85,477.

Amazingly, among the publications, 92.5% didn’t point out whether these organs hailed from death row inmates, and up to 99% didn’t reveal whether the donors agreed with the donation or not. Also, 73% of these studies said that their researches gained approval from an institutional ethics committee.

According to research from the outside, there has been a clear difference between the number of people donating their organs and that of people receiving transplant surgery. The investigators concluded that some of these organs were taken from the conscious prisoners.

To deal with this system, they give some recommendations as below:

Firstly, they require the revocation of the papers which did not comply with the standards on international ethics. This aims to warn researchers not to ignore the rules.

Secondly, the transplant community should hold a meeting at the international summit to build a system including processes and policies applied for all of the researches in the future. In addition, before this kind of research is published, the journals must know where the organs originate from.

The researchers also reach a conclusion that, before the summit, all publications concerning the transplantation shouldn’t publish any transplant study conducted by China to save more lives from Chinese authorities.