Word: organ
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...while the details of this particular case are appalling, and the scam is the first - or at least first to be exposed - involving foreigners from as far away as the U.S. and U.K flying in for transplants, Indians are sadly all too familiar with organ rackets. In 2007, police in southern India uncovered an illegal kidney trade involving fishermen whose jobs had been destroyed by the Indian Ocean tsunami. A massive transplant ring in Punjab was also uncovered in 2003. Police there believe at least 30 of the donors, who as in this latest case were poor, illiterate workers promised...
...India's illegal organ trade is driven in part by the incredible imbalance between supply and demand for legal organs. The Indian government banned the sale of kidneys for commercial gain in 1994; lawbreakers can be jailed for up to five years. But legal organ donations remain rare in India. The Multi Organ Harvesting Aid Network (MOHAN), a Chennai-based non-government group that promotes legal organ donation, puts donation rates in India at well under 1 per million, compared to rates of more than 20 per million in places such as Spain, the U.S. and France. The group...
Shocked but not surprised. That might be the best way to sum up India's reaction to the revelation this week that a black market organ transplant ring had been harvesting kidneys from poor Indian laborers, sometimes against their wishes, and using them in foreigners desperate for transplants. Police who busted the ring last week say doctors paid as little as $1000 for the kidneys and then sold them for as much as $37,500. The racket, based in Gurgaon, a business center close to the capital, New Delhi, drew victims from as many as eight Indian states and lasted...
...fact that the chimeric state is not permanent, with the immune system eventually returning to its original state. Yet the patients have nonetheless continued to tolerate their donated kidneys for almost five years. Why? Sachs believes that once the immune system is trained to accept the donated organ, sentry cells protect the organ from being recognized as foreign. The transplanted kidney exists in an immune bubble, guarded from the T cells that could still destroy...
...that's the case, say transplant surgeons, it might even be possible in coming years to look outside our species for much needed organs. Once the human immune system can be trained to safely accept foreign tissue, then these so-called xenotransplants, from pigs or primates, could provide a welcome solution to the organ shortages that still put 98,000 patients in the U.S. each year on waiting lists...