Wed, Feb 08, 2017 page5

• China touts organ program reforms

  DONATION DEMAND: China said it is no longer using organs from executed prisoners, but doubts remain as the government strives to raise the number of voluntary donations

  • AP, ROME
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  China is stepping up its efforts to persuade the international medical community that it has stopped using executed prisoners as organ donors, sending a high-level delegation to a Vatican conference amid continued skepticism that the practice has ended.

  Former Chinese vice minister of health Huang Jiefu (黃潔夫) on Monday said that reforms to China’s organ transplant program have been slow and “very difficult.”

  However, he said that the measures taken to outlaw the practice have made significant progress, even though China still “has a long way to go” to meet its transplant needs.

  “From Jan. 1, 2015, organ donation from voluntary civilian organ donors has become the only legitimate source of organ transplantations,” he said in an interview at the Chinese embassy in Italy. “This is the whole story.”

  Huang was to speak at the Vatican conference yesterday amid complaints from human rights groups and organ trafficking watchdogs that the Vatican is effectively endorsing a “whitewash” by inviting him.

  “Without transparency, verification of alleged reforms is impossible,” said Torsten Trey, executive director of the group Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting, which called on the Vatican conference to demand that China provide documented evidence and independent scrutiny about its practices.

  The Vatican has defended the invitation, which comes as Pope Francis seeks to improve ties with Beijing and bring its estimated 12 million Catholics under Rome’s wing.

  Huang in 2005 publicly acknowledged that China harvested executed inmates’ organs for transplant and a paper he coauthored six years later reported that as many as 90 percent of Chinese transplant surgeries using organs from dead people came from those put to death.

  International human rights advocates and domestic critics have long said that standard safeguards were ignored when obtaining organs from prisoners who might have been pressured to donate.

  China said it would phase out the practice by 2015 and Huang told reporters that it has kept to its word.

  However, doubts persist that China is meeting its pledge, given its severe shortage of organ donors and China’s longstanding black-market organ trade.

  By its own figures, China has one of the lowest rates of organ donation in the world, because of ingrained cultural attitudes and a legal requirement that family members give consent before organs are donated, even if a person had expressed a desire to donate.

  Even the organ donation system’s advocates say it needs hundreds of additional hospitals and doctors.

  Huang said the number of voluntary organ donors increased 50 percent from 2015 to last year, to 4,080, and that he was “very optimistic” China would outpace the US in terms of the number of organ donors in five years.

  He said China still needed help.

  “That’s why we have come to the Vatican,” he said. “We have come to learn as well as to tell what is happening in China.”

  Huang said he is the highest-ranking Chinese official to attend a Vatican event, as a member of the official government advisory body, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Congress.

  Huang said his participation had been approved by China’s highest authorities, who wanted “China’s voice to be heard.”

  Beijing severed diplomatic relations with the Holy See in 1951, shortly after the Chinese Communist Party took power, and officially allows worship only in state-sanctioned churches.

  Starting with Pope Benedict XVI the Vatican sought to improve ties and under Francis cultural exchanges have increased and working groups have met over the vexing issue of bishop nominations.

  The conference at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences marks a next step, although Huang was quick to stress that he was attending as a surgeon and medical expert, not necessarily a diplomatic emissary.

  Vivek Jha, executive director of the George Institute for Global Health in India, said it was important to keep engaging China in dialogue in hopes that they would make the necessary changes to the transplant system, while maintaining a healthy skepticism.

  “It’s perhaps rather foolish of us to believe all the official statements of China saying that they have changed,” he said. “Engaging them does not mean we have to accept their policies and the statements they make without any evidence of change.”
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