Overseas, there are frequent reports of mainland doctors illegally harvesting organs from living people or cadavers, but the circumstances and facts of these cases are rarely made public. Recently, a court in Anhui province ruled in a case of stealing cadaveric organs and selling them for transplants, involving 11 dead people and four doctors, the mastermind of which was a doctoral-level surgeon.
The liver and kidneys of the 11 deceased were harvested illegally and without authorization. The court found that the six defendants violated the “Human Organ Transplant Regulations” by not having Red Cross personnel present to supervise and witness the organ donation process, by conducting cross-regional organ donations without approval, and by going against the wishes of the deceased or his next of kin without the joint signature of his spouse, adult children, and parents. A total of 11 cadaveric organ harvesting operations were performed in Huaiyuan County, Anhui Province.
Among the six defendants, four physicians were involved in the case: Dr. Xinli Huang, chief of Nanjing Gulou Hospital; Dr. Sen Lu, chief of Jiangsu Provincial People’s Hospital; Dr. Suxun Yang, former director of the ICU at Huaiyuan County People’s Hospital in Anhui Province; and Dr. Hailiang Wang, a physician at Huabei General Miners Hospital. Among them, Dr. Xinli Huang and Dr. Sen Lu were the OPO (Organ Procurement Organization) staff at their hospitals, and Dr. Hailiang Wang was the OPO liaison officer.
OPO is the abbreviation for Organ Procurement Organization, which refers to a medical organization or institution that relies on qualified medical institutions, consisting of medical personnel from the departments of surgery, intensive care medicine and other departments, as well as human organ donation coordinators, to engage in the acquisition, preservation and transfer of human organs after the death of citizens.
According to the 32-year-old Shi Xianglin’s confession, in February 2018, his mother, Li Ping, suffered a severe cranial injury and died five days after being taken to the Huaiyuan County People’s Hospital. At the time, Shi Xianglin was also injured and hospitalized, and only after he was discharged did he learn that his mother’s liver and kidneys had been donated and removed on the day of her death, and that 200,000 yuan in “state aid” had been transferred to the account of one of his cousins.
Shi Xianglin went to Beijing to check with the China Human Organ Donation Management Center, but could not find any information about his mother’s organ donation. He approached the health department and judicial authorities, and the Huaiyuan County Public Security Bureau investigated the case before it came to light.
The police found that from 2017 to 2018, the defendants Huang Xinli, Wang Hailiang, Yang Suxun, Huang Chaoyang, Ouyang, and Lu Sen violated the Human Organ Transplantation Regulations. The Huaiyuan County Court held that Huang Xinli, Wang Hailiang, Yang Suxun, and Lu Sen, as medical personnel, were aware of the regulations on human organ donation, but in this case, they failed to fulfill many of the required procedures set forth by the state and illegally and without authorization harvested the organs of the deceased for transplantation.
The verdict states that the three doctors involved in the case had OPO status, but they “washed their hands of the crime” and illegally harvested organs under false pretenses.
The first defendant, Huang Xinli, has a PhD and was the chief physician of hepatobiliary surgery at Nanjing Gulou Hospital before the murder. Lu Sen, who also has a PhD, was a chief hepatobiliary surgeon at Jiangsu Provincial People’s Hospital. Wang Hailiang was a doctor in the Department of Stomatology at the Luling Branch Hospital of the Huabei General Hospital of Minerals in Anhui Province before the incident.
The defendant testified that, if the patient’s family was interested in donating, they would send the patient’s labs to Huang Xinli to see if the patient’s organs could be used. If the organs were available, Huang Xinli would send Wang Hailiang over to the patient’s family to sign for them. What was provided was a “Chinese Human Organ Donation Form”. But on this form, the registration unit and number are blank, and there is no official seal.
According to the first trial verdict, 10 of the operations to remove the organs were performed by Huang Xinli, assisted by Wang Hailiang. The surgery was performed by a high-speed train from Nanjing to Huaiyuan, which is more than 200 kilometers away, via Bengbu.
The surgery is usually scheduled for the latter part of the night. In the past few years, there have been a number of cases in which people have abandoned treatment and have been “judged dead” by the police, and they have been pushed into a white van with the appearance of an ambulance.
The court noted that the computerized organ allocation and sharing system, which has been mandatory in mainland China since September 2013, “automatically allocates” organs based on medical needs. However, under the guise of organ donation, Huang Xinli and others illegally harvested human organs from the deceased under the lure of “state compensation,” and used such methods as transplanting before allocation, falsifying and altering medical data, and manipulating the organ flow entry system to “launder” the illegally harvested human organs. “The organs were taken away by Huang Xinli.
Huang Xinli took most of the liver, kidneys, and other organs with him, either directly to the People’s Hospital in Jiangsu Province, where he was at the time, or to hospitals overseas. Before removing the organs, he would make private contacts with the donor or hospital that needed the organs, and then “supply” them.
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