Canada's medical profession: the 1st to issue official policy to curb organ trafficking

[snagglepuss]

Globe and Mail Editorial

Stringent new guidelines aimed at deterring prospective transplant tourists set an important precedent. Canada's medical profession is the first in the world to develop an official policy statement on organ trafficking. It is an appropriate, if long overdue, directive.

The policy, by the Canadian Societies of Transplantation and of Nephrology, is to be discussed Monday in Vancouver at an international meeting of The Transplantation Society. It allows doctors to refuse to treat patients who participate in the lucrative trade, which exploits the world's most vulnerable. It also directs doctors to counsel their patients about the treatment of people who sell their body parts; in some cases, sellers have been taken by force, or even killed for their organs.

Buying and selling livers, hearts, kidneys and other body parts is illegal in Canada and most countries, but the enterprise continues in many developing countries. From 2000 to 2008 in B.C. alone, 93 Canadians, 90 per cent of them ethnic minorities from countries such as China, India and Pakistan, bought kidneys overseas.

snip

If patients are determined to become transplant tourists, it is appropriate that doctors may choose to terminate their relationship with them, and refuse to provide pre-transplant screening or prescriptions. But physicians must, as the guidelines note, still treat emergency needs: They can refer patients to someone else for ongoing care.





http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/editorials/for-organ-transplants-consider-a-stay-cation/article1671337/

[KT2000]

1. another good move

by Canada.
Here in the US we have the free marketers who are trying to make the case for the selling of organs in the US. One lawyer went so far as to state that the population would be healthier because people would want to have valuable organs to sell on the market.
Here in the US nuts like that are given consideration, then people are afraid to offend them and end up taking no action to protect the poor from exploitation.