The Cleveland Free Times : Made In China -- Protesters At the Clinic Decry China's "Transplant Tourism Industry'

By Dan Harkins

Volume 14, Issue 18
Published August 23rd, 2006

Most everybody's heard that hundreds of thousands of Chinese, practicing a peaceable, meditation-centered philosophy of healthy living called Falun Gong, have been persecuted, beaten down, ushered to labor camps and even executed for seven years now by totalitarian leaders bent on keeping communism viable. But that's just part of what appears to be some really sadistic [things] going down.

Two Canadian human rights lawyers recently studied allegations that the Chinese government has been mining organs from many of those executed Falun Gong prisoners to make transplant waiting lists shorter than that country's constitution (http://investigation.go.saveinter.net/). Their conclusion: The allegations are true.

On Saturday, a dozen Chinese Americans gathered at a Carnegie Road intersection in the Cleveland Clinic complex to decry the abomination -- and to ask for help in addressing the problem.

"It's feeding the transplant tourism industry," says Sunny Lu, a physician/professor from the University of Cincinnati, who was among the protesters. "So what you have is one person who's having their life saved and another who's losing their life to save it."

The study, based on witness and survivor statements, as well as statistical data, said the China International Transplantation Assistant Center is advertising on its Web site that, for a kidney, patients need wait "only one week to find out the suitable donor, the maximum time being one month."

Other centers advertise on Web pages wait times for other organs in similar time frames. The median waiting time for a kidney in Canada was 32.5 months in 2003 and even longer elsewhere, like here. Having a large bank to harvest must be the only way China can assure such short waits, the study found.

Lu says she's spoken to doctors from all over the world during the stateside Falun Gong group's travels to various hospitals around the Midwest. So many, she says, have acknowledged knowing of patients who've traveled to China or neighboring Asian countries for the turnaround.

"A lot of people, because of the waiting times, they're looking for other ways to get organs in a shorter time, and we think that's why China has taken advantage of this need," Lu says. "So what are we going to do? This, it's never happened on planet earth like this. Now, they're not only killing them, but selling their organs for profit. A normal human can't comprehend how such things can happen. It's like a nightmare."

Lu wants physicians to take an active role in advising patients to ensure the democratic origins of their new eyeballs. And she wants all politicians to take a more active role in forcing China to end the slaughter.

"Any government or normal society would consider this person the best citizen of their country," she says. "These people are part of the mainstream, they work, they have families. They're just doing this exercise to try to improve themselves and their communities. But the communist regime is not a normal government."

http://www.freetimes.com/story/620

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