Post #5

Black Market Organs:

 How far would you go to get a  new kidney transplant in order to survive? Many people are willing to take matters into their own hands avoiding the long wait of an organ donor, or not receiving an organ at all. Some die awaiting a healthy organ to be donated. As desperate people become more impatient, some will seek out means of obtaining a healthy organ by standards most of us would consider cruel, unthinkable, and just downright disgusting. These people will travel to various places around the world in hopes of finding the organ they need, through what is known as an "Organ Broker". An organ broker preys upon those who are financially frantic in different parts of the world, however the biggest targets are countries that have experienced recent economic crisis or natural disaster. These brokers will convince desperate victims to sell their organs to the broker who will then re-sell it to another patient for a substantially larger amount of money. This is how organ brokers turn their profits, buying organs from victims for a fraction of the cost they sell to the patient. This continues to happen for several reasons, economic despair will force victims to do unthinkable things for money, and unhealthy people will do and pay whatever it takes to get healthy and avoid a potentially never ending waiting list, even if it takes buying someone else's organs illegally, and putting them in your own body. An organization that works to prevent situations like this from happening is the World Health Organization ( W.H.O). Organs and many other body parts are among the most common items sold illegally in black markets around the globe. Many of the desperate donors, ( most of which live in developing countries) are willing to to sell their own body parts in exchange for a profit. One journalist, traveled to a refugee camp in India, where women are lined up with exposed abdomens to sell their kidneys. This is why the camp earned itself the nickname "Kidneyville". These situations are often found in poor countries with little or no medical care. An estimated 10% of all organ transplants, come from organs that were "freshly" collected from refugee camps according to the W.H.O. Patients who are desperate for money often travel to China, India, or Pakistan for their surgeries, paying nearly $200,000 for a kidney while organ brokers pay desperate donators only $5,000.