Significant Hints

• Traditionally, Chinese, as well as other Asians, are reluctant to donate organs for transplantation purposes. In accordance with this tendency Vice Health Minister Huang Jiefu admitted at a summit for transplant doctors held in Guangzhou in November 2006 that the communist government was torturing prisoners, executing them and trafficking in their body parts. "Apart from a small portion of traffic victims, most of the organs from cadavers are from executed prisoners. ... The current organ donation shortfall can't meet demand." (China Daily newspaper)
  
  Some experts estimate that over 90 percent of organ transplants in China come from prisoners. Chinese transplant physician, Dr. Zhonghua Chen, said at a conference in Boston in July that Chinese doctors had transplanted 8,102 kidneys, 3,741 livers and 80 hearts in 2005, reported the Los Angeles Times.
  
  With a small amount of freely donated organs, and a constant number of executions per year the unexplained gap between supply and demand raises the question: where do all the organs come from?
  
  Amnesty international estimates the number of executions between 2,000 and 10,000 per year. This would almost match with the numbers of transplantation, but it does not explain that all death row candidates match with the blood types and tissue factors of the recipients. In order to provide all the recipients with an transplant the projected number of organ donors must be even higher than the actual number of transplantations.
  
  This lack of transparency could be explained with the allegations described in the Kilgour & Matas Report.
  
  
• On websites of Chinese transplantation centers as well as in Chinese newspapers a fair amount of examples are published that organs can be provided within a short period of time. It is advertised that the waiting time for a kidney is less than 4 weeks, in many cases only 1-2 weeks. A liver or a heart can be provided within 1-2 months.
  
  In order to fulfill the needs of a matching blood and tissue type it would again require a large amount of donors in order to provide these organs. This applies especially to organs like liver and heart, which are essential to live.
  
  Again, the question is, where do all the transplanted organs come from. The allegations of a living pool of donors whose organs are harvested on demand is likely to be the answer to this question.
  

Reports from China

Kidney Transplant Performed Twice Within 48 Hours-
On May 17, 2006, China Times printed an article entitled "Kidney Transplants Performed Twice within 48 Hours for 220,000 Yuan (US$27,440)." According to this article, on December 19, 2004, 49 year-old Xue Yanlin Fuyang in Anhui, suffered from uremia and was hospitalized in Beijing Haidian Hospital's transplant center. Nine days later, on the afternoon of December 28, a physician from the Transplant Center brought kidneys from an outside source with blood type and Penel reactive antibody (PRA) that matched Xue's. At 10:10 that evening, Xue was wheeled into the operating room; by 11 p.m. that same night, the chief surgeon Han Xiuwu, entered the operating room. Four hours later, Xue Yanlin was wheeled out of the operating room. Han said: "The surgery was not successful." On the morning of 29th at 9 am, B scan examination confirmed failure of the kidney transplant operation.
According to Xue's husband Lu Xiaoxing, "The diseased kidney was not removed because Han was in a hurry to get back to Kunming on the same day for another operation; he said there was a kidney source there, he would bring back another kidney the next day, remove the diseased kidney and replace it with the new kidney." On December 30, Xue underwent emergency surgery due to a heart attack. By 11 pm that evening, Han returned from Kunming with a new kidney and performed the kidney transplant on Xue for a second time. The two transplant operations took place within 48 hours.

Seeking the Mysterious Organ Sources of Shenyang City's Multi-Organ Transplant Center -
Located in Shenyang City, Liaoning Province, the China International Transplantation Network Assistance Center (CITNAC) advertised on their website that "If you send your personal data to this center by e-mail or fax and accept the necessary body examination in Shenyang, China in order to assure a suitable donor, it may take only one month to receive a liver transplantation, the maximum waiting time being two months. As for the kidney transplantation, it may take one week to find a suitable donor, the maximum time being one month."
Because of traditional values, kidneys taken from live bodies of family members account for a very small portion currently. According to the report "To Transplant or Not to Transplant", published in Modern Business Daily of Beijing on June 10, 2004, transplant surgery using kidneys from family members represents about 1.5 percent of the total.
According to the article "Organ Transplant: An Area that Needs Fast Regulations," carried in the 147th issue of Finance Journal in December 2005, Deputy Health Minister of China Huang Jiefu admitted for the first time at a WHO meeting held in Manila from November 7 to 9 that at present most organs China uses for transplant come from death-row convicts. 

"5500 successful kidney transplant cases in China last year [2002]"

Chinese Hospital Gives Away 20 Free Organ Transplants -
"Twenty Organ Transplants Free of Charge," at the Hunan Provincial People's Hospital, read the April 28 edition of the Hunan Xiaoxiang Morning Herald. The advertisement was for a special hospital promotion giving away 20 free liver or kidney transplants. Patients were instructed to call the paper's hotline to register. The hospital also advertised its promotion in other media, including the Changsha Evening Post and Hunan Economics TV Station.

Military Hospital Openly Admits Transplant Organs Come from Falun Gong Practitioners -