China has made necessary moves in addressing its involvement to the once-widespread illegal practice of taking organs from executed prisoners recently. Though confirmed, the World Health Organization said that there may still be hidden things going on.
Organ trafficking was the subject of Vatican conference this week and China had stopped that unethical practice of taking organs from executed prisoners, a former top Chinese official said. Jose Ramon Nunez-Pena, a WHO official, is convinced with that statement when he visited about 20 hospitals in China last year but confirmed that the practice may not be totally eliminated, according to Washington Post.
Nunez-Pena said that China has more than 1 million medical centers and only 169 can legally do transplants. He had seen registries and data including transplant and confirmed the country was already reforming away from an illegal harvest of organs from prisoners. "But in a country as huge as China, we can't know everything," he added.
Critics are still unconvinced that they suggested WHO to conduct random investigations and interview donor relatives. The U.N. is not authorized, only if the country waived for them to enter without proper permission. Taking organs from prisoners was not only practiced in China that is why China should not be singled out for such treatment, Dr. Haibo Wang, a Chinese doctor responded.
Chron reported that Dr. Huang Jeifu, the head of Chinese delegation presented the proof of China's reform on taking organs from prisoners as he claimed that there had been an increase in both living and deceased voluntary organ donor following China's crackdown on the illicit organ trade. His claim was not believed by Vivek Jha, executive director of the George Institute for Global Health in India when he said that it sounds a little hard to believe that China could have so quickly made this change to its organ donation program. He added that in order for China to prove its claim they should provide the international transplant community with data that its organs are no longer being illegally procured.
