Pakistani villagers fall prey to kidney trade

BAHAWALPUR, Pakistan, Aug 11: Amjad Ali, a poor villager from the Cholistan Desert in eastern Pakistan, was promised a job and money in exchange for a kidney.

That was ten months ago. Now he's got no job, no money, and one kidney.

Slumped on a wooden cot in the compound of his spartan two-room house, Ali feels weak and is in constant discomfort as he tells an all too common story of how Pakistani organ traffickers prey on poor, ignorant peasants and workers.

''They promised me a job and took me to Rawalpindi. They drugged me, made me unconscious for days and cut out my kidney,'' Amjad said, his voice full of bitterness, as his father wept silently beside him.

Before an operation, donors are housed in the cities so that blood and tissue samples can be matched with potential recipients.

Unlike many other parts of the world, including neighbouring India, there is no law in Pakistan banning the trade in organs.

Sick, but wealthy Pakistanis, and foreigners from Saudi Arabia, the Gulf, Britain and Canada flock to private hospitals in Rawalpindi and Lahore for kidney transplants, made possible by donors' whose own post-operative welfare is callously neglected.

''We are taking this issue very seriously. A bill on it is with the national assembly and I think it should be tabled and approved in the next session, in August,'' Minister of State for health, Shahnaz Sheikh, said.

Dr Adeeb Rizvi, a surgeon at a state-run hospital for Urology and Transplantation in the southern city of Karachi believes the post-operative neglect of donors is the most sickening aspect of the kidney trade.

''The issue is these people don't get proper post-operative medical care and their health suffers rapidly affecting their life,'' Rizvi said.

Unprotected

Defeated as he sounds, Ali wants the agents who lured him into losing a kidney to pay for ruining his life.

''I don't know what they did with my kidney, but I want justice or compensation,'' Ali said. His village Chak 45, in the sub-district of Yazman, is 27 kilometres from Bahawalpur in the south of Punjab province.

Ali's father has taken loans, sold his goats and crockery and even bricks to pay for his son's case to be brought to court.

Reuters