By the time her work brought her back to the United States, Nancy Scheper-Hughes had spent more than a decade tracking the illegal sale of human organs across the globe. Posing as a medical doctor in some places and a would-be kidney buyer in others, she had linked gangsters, clergymen and surgeons in a trail that led from South Africa, Brazil and other developing nations all the way back to some of her own country's best medical facilities...
By accident or by design, she believed, surgeons in their unit had been transplanting black-market kidneys from residents of the world's most impoverished slums into the failing bodies of wealthy dialysis patients from Israel, Europe and the United States. According to Scheper-Hughes, the arrangements were being negotiated by an elaborate network of criminals who kept most of the money themselves.
For about $150,000 per transplant, these organ brokers would reach across continents to connect buyers and sellers, whom they then guided to "broker-friendly" hospitals here in the United States (places where Scheper-Hughes says surgeons were either complicit in the scheme or willing to turn a blind eye). The brokers themselves often posed as or hired clergy to accompany their clients into the hospital and ensure that the process went smoothly. The organ sellers typically got a few thousand dollars for their troubles, plus the chance to see an American city...
At first, not even Scheper-Hughes believed the rumors. It was in the mid-1980s, during a study of infant mortality in the shantytowns of northern Brazil, that she initially caught wind of mythical "body snatcher" stories: vans of English-speaking foreigners would circle a village rounding up street kids whose bodies would later be found in trash bins removed of their livers, eyes, kidneys and hearts...
http://www.newsweek.com/2009/01/09/not-just-urban-legend.htmlSometimes you just hate being right. One of the reasons I got out of clinical nursing was that, as a floating critical care/ER nurse in a busy teaching hospital, I got tired of watching young poor kids come in through the ER with gunshot wounds, end up in a coma in the neuro ICU waiting for the surgeons to harvest their organs to transplant them into the people who could afford them and then care for the organ recipients in the surgical ICU. No matter how many lives are saved by transplants, we have to face the reality that the situation is ripe for exploitation.
Dirty, Pretty Things (2002), winner of the Best Independent British Film, 2003, written by Steven Knight, depicts the plight of illegal immigrants in the UK, who sell their organs in exchange for passports. Fiction?
CNN reported yesterday that police in India have cracked an international organ-trafficking ring. Organs harvested from the poor and sold to the wealthy, one Dr. Amit Kumar, a.k.a. Santosh Rameshwar Raut, the alleged mastermind. This same doctor had a previous arrest in 1994 for running a similar scheme in Bombay. He skipped bail and started up his "practice" in other cities.
One doctor and patients were held - including two from the US. ABC reports that the two US citizens, dialysis patients, are forbidden to leave the country because they are suspected of waiting for illegal transplant operations. Dr. Kumar is on the lam and is thought to have fled India. CNN has video of the victims and their surgical wounds. Some were taken by force, being promised jobs, and nurses, doctors and medical technicians were involved in the procedures. Interpol reports that as many as 50 health care workers were involved in the racket. Punishment if a doctor is found guilty of illegal transplants in India? Two years jail time.
Read more:
http://www.healthline.com/blogs/healthline_connects/2008/01/calling-dr-kumar-real-life-dirty-pretty.html#ixzz1BemnZJbY 
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