Organ trade: 'Top docs involved'

VIENNA: Top transplant surgeons are collaborating with criminal organ trafficking networks to target the desperate, an expert has said. "It involves people from the highest level of their profession," said Nancy Scheper-Hughes, founding director of Organs Watch, a research project at University of California in Berkeley. Scheper-Hughes, a professor who is also the director of the university’s medical anthropology programme, made these remarks at the Forum to Fight Human Trafficking in Vienna. Organs Watch has branches in 10 countries. Scheper-Hughes said some surgeons are “willing to collaborate with the lowest levels of society - with criminal networks, brokers and with kidney hunters, who are the absolutely necessary factor.” "We don’t really know how many people are trafficked for organs," she said, estimating that the number of trafficked kidneys was 15,000 each year. Scheper-Hughes said that there were "strong cases" documenting coercion in India, Eastern Europe, Turkey, Israel and the United States.