By Carol Pearson, VOA,
Washington, D.C.
Kidney sales are legal in Iran, and they
take place in other countries where they are technically against the law. Now,
a prominent American surgeon advocates making kidney sales legal in the United
States. VOA's Carol Pearson has more.
Dominick Lawson is two years old. He was born with
defective kidneys. So every 48 hours his mother, Kelly Lawson, brings him to
the hospital for kidney dialysis. "As long as I'm sitting here, I'll search the
globe to try to find him a kidney," she says, holding back tears.
Dominick is on a waiting list for a donated kidney,
but the average wait is so long that many people die while they are on the
waiting list. Some doctors say a drastic remedy is required.
Dr. Arthur
Matas is a former president of the American Society of Transplant
Surgeons. He says, "It sounds like the wrong thing to do, to be buying kidneys,
until you start realizing that unless we do something dramatic, we're going to
have a continuation of this situation where patients are dying on dialysis and
their quality of life is worse."
But the U.S. government and major medical
organizations, including the National Kidney
Foundation, are against the sale of kidneys. Another prominent surgeon,
Dr. Gabriel Danovitch, explains. "If kidney sales were allowed in the United
States, the sellers would be the most vulnerable among us, who would probably be
desperate for money, who may be willing not to tell the truth about their
medical histories or the donated kidney."
One thing transplant surgeons agree on is the
need. Dr. Dorey Segev works at the Johns Hopkins University Medical Center.
"More and more people are developing kidney failure and more and more people are
becoming candidates for a transplant," says the doctor.
Dr. Matas says the federal government should
regulate the sales and require sellers to get complete physical and
psychological evaluations before any procedure, and then, get follow up care
afterwards. He argues it is legal to buy and sell human blood, eggs and sperm
in the U.S., so why not include kidneys?
By his calculations, a kidney transplant saves
the expense of dialysis and long-term medical costs. "The only way that we will
know whether or not such a system will work is to try a pilot project," proposes
Dr. Matas.
Right now there is little support to change the
law and make kidney sales legal in the U.S., but Dr. Matas keeps pushing for
continued discussion and research that might save thousands of lives.
