The general argument is that the illegal sale of kidneys flourish because of the abject poverty of donors and the willingness of ‘wealthy’ recipients. Does this mean that only rich people suffer from kidney failure. The poor also equally suffer.
There is only a temporary solution by dialysis, which is very expensive and leads to infection in an already debilitated patient. It has to be done thrice a week. In Bangalore, how many government hospitals have dialysis facility and how many nephrologists are available for consultation?
In many cases, money changes hands to help the donor to recoup and resume normal life. In my opinion, this amount is worth the salt as the recipient is able to lead a normal life and also helps the donor.
My only concern is about the middlemen/brokers, who illegally pocket a huge part of the money given by the recipient. Only a paltry sum reaches the donor. This is what I could gather from the media. There should be a mechanism to prevent this. But in our country, touts rule almost all fields and illegal money transaction takes place everywhere. Now it has become a part and parcel of our day to day life.
I know a boy, who was suffering from kidney failure and the nephrologist suggested that his sister could donate a kidney. But their father said “no” at the cost of his son’s life. How many related transplants can take place under such circumstances?
How many cadaver kidneys are available, taking into account the number of kidney failure patients? It is negligible. Many kidney patients are aware of this but they have to wait for years. Even in the USA, the waiting period for cadaver transplant runs into years.
Banning unrelated transplant totally may put the lives of many patients at jeopardy. Also, they will be a pauper financially due to heavy cost of dialysis. A way has to be found out to make unrelated transplants more transparent and also to eliminate the middlemen. This will help a lot of suffering kidney failure patients. Undergoing dialysis is equal to going to “hell”, which is my personal experience. It is a torture. It is easy to preach but only the sufferer knows his plight. This particular subject needs a lot of discussion by experts and legal luminaries, before any decision is taken in both ways — either banning or allowing unrelated transplants.