Calls for kidney market as transplant demand soars

By Tom Heneghan

ROTTERDAM (Reuters) - World markets match buyers and sellers for goods as different as oil and wheat or cars and computers. Why not for human organs like kidneys?

Strong demand for life-saving transplants and short supply of organs has raised ethical issues about whether humans should be treated like vessels to provide spare parts.

With a potentially vast supply of organs from often poor donors in developing countries for mostly rich recipients in the West, calls for "kidney for sale" schemes are getting louder.

The traditional ethical view that buying and selling organs is shameful -- upheld by legal bans on sales in Europe and North America -- is now under pressure due to a dramatic shortage of one of the most frequently transplanted organs, the kidney.

In the United States and Europe, most tissue for transplant is taken fresh from cadavers of the newly deceased. A smaller amount comes from live donors, mostly from a relative or friend.

"It is morally wrong to continue to let patients suffer and die on dialysis when we can do something to prevent it," Arthur Matas, a University of Minnesota transplant surgeon, told a conference in Rotterdam on European transplantation policy.

Those who defend these bans "are sentencing some of our transplantation candidates to death," he argued in a plea for a regulated market in organs to help meet the growing demand.

Matas was clearly in a minority amid speakers who warned a market system would discourage so-called "altruistic donations."