Organ harvesting links pressure Australian university
Australian Broadcasting Corporation
Broadcast: 29/04/2013
Reporter: Adam Harvey
An Australian university is under fire for honouring a Chinese professor linked to China’s controversial organ transplant program.
Transcript
LEIGH SALES, PRESENTER: Every year in China thousands of prisoners are executed and their deaths provide kidneys, lungs and livers for the country’s organ transplant program.
The practice is hugely controversial. Human rights campaigners have long condemned the link between executions and organ harvest.
For more than a decade, one of the key figures behind the program was an Australian-trained doctor. Huang Jiefu has since been honoured by his alma mater, the University of Sydney.
Now, a coalition of academics, doctors and lawyers say the university must strip Huang of his honorary professorships.
Adam Harvey has this exclusive report.
ADAM HARVEY, REPORTER: These are the gulags of China where people spend years for crimes like speaking against the Government. Many never leave here alive. China leads the world in executions, thousands killed each year, according to human rights group Amnesty. And when those prisoners die, their organs live on.
DAVID MATAS, AUTHOR, BLOODY HARVEST: They do a lot of organ sourcing for transplants. They’re number one in the world after the United States in terms of volume. And until this year, they haven’t had a functioning donation system and the numbers they’re generating are very small for donations, so the organs are coming from prisoners.
MARIA FIATARONE SINGH, FACULTY OF HEALTH SCIENCE, SYDNEY UNI.: In the 1990s a very special form of lethal injection called slow lethal injection was perfected in China by Chinese officials as a way to preserve the organs so that the person is basically anaesthetised, they don’t die right away, gives the surgeons the time to take out as many organs as they would like to and then the lethal injection is finalised. So, it’s done in a way that actually allows this very, very unsavoury mix of execution and medical care and treatment to be done by the same team of doctors. It’s horrific, really.
ADAM HARVEY: For years, recipients from all over the world have bought organs from Chinese authorities. A prisoner’s body can be worth as much as half a million dollars when it’s broken down into parts like kidneys, liver and lungs. China says the prisoners donate their organs, but the practice is condemned by the UN, the World Health Organization and international medical bodies.
DAVID MATAS: It’s a cause of environment, it’s not a meaningful consent when you’re in prison and sentenced to death and all the medical profession, The Transplantation Society, the World Medical Association, the World Health Organisation say you cannot source organs from prisoners sentenced to death, even with consent.
ADAM HARVEY: China’s transplant program has sparked protests around the world. In Sydney last week, members of the Falun Gong group, which is outlawed in China, took a stand against so-called transplant tourism where Australians travel to China to receive organs.
DAVID MATAS: We’ve talked to lot of patients, transplant tourist patients. They’re told there’s consent, but there’s no documentary record of consent. There’s no paper trail of consent. It’s verbiage without substantiation.
DAVID SHOEBRIDGE, NSW GREENS MP: That’s why we should amending our laws in Australia and making it a crime for someone to engage in this unethical practice, whether it’s in Australia, or China, Philippines or India.
ADAM HARVEY: The head of China’s transplant program for more than a decade was this man, Huang Jiefu, who trained at Sydney’s Prince Albert Hospital and was a visiting scholar at the University of Sydney.
DAVID MATAS: He’s a Western-trained transplant doctor. He became Deputy Minister of Health in the Chinese system and was responsible for the transplantation system for 12 years and he was doing transplants at the same time as he was an administrator in the system.
MARIA FIATARONE SINGH: He himself is a liver transplant surgeon and he has stated as recently as November, 2012 that he continues to perform about two liver transplants every week – so that would be 100 organs a year, and using his own figures, 90 to 95 per cent of those would have come from executed prisoners.
ADAM HARVEY: He’s been lauded by the university with an honorary professorship and that title was recently extended for another three years.
Now, Maria Fiatarone Singh, a professor of Medicine at the university, wants him stripped of that honour.
MARIA FIATARONE SINGH: We shouldn’t be giving him any publicity or honour for the kind of things that he’s done. He can’t possibly be adhering to the dictum that we all take an oath of, which is “first, do no harm”, because there’s no way that you could consider using people the way he has as transplant donors as being concordant with that philosophy.
ADAM HARVEY: She’s petitioned vice chancellor Michael Spence to take back Huang’s honours. Co-signatories include surgeons and medical professors from the United States, Germany and Israel and NSW Greens MP David Shoebridge.
DAVID SHOEBRIDGE: This is one of our most prestigious institutions, the University of Sydney. It’s meant to stand up for the best ideals of our society – democracy, academic freedom. And for it to be awarding some of its highest honours on a medical practitioner who for year after year benefitted from transplanting the organs of executed prisoners is a betrayal of those key ideals that the university should be standing up for.
ADAM HARVEY: But Huang Jiefu has his defenders who say he’s worked to end China’s reliance on prisoners’ organs.
Professor Bruce Robinson authorised Huang’s appointment to honorary professor.
BRUCE ROBINSON, PROFESSOR: Huang Jiefu’s a great leader. He’s led the reform of the organ donation system in China.
PROFESSOR RICHARD ALLEN: Huang Jiefu, to his great credit, has developed (inaudible) trials and protocols and has demanded that every hospital that is involved in transplantation in China have a deceased organ donor program that involves the use of donors who have died as a result of circuitry death. In the transplant clinical setting around the world, we see him as a champion, an absolute champion and a hero… I’ve known Huang since 1987, and in discussions with him when he was in Sydney at the time, he knew at that stage that the use of organs from deceased – from executed prisoners was wrong. At the time he was a junior surgeon and he was part of the system and he did what his seniors did.
ADAM HARVEY: But despite his efforts, China’s transplant program remains heavily reliant on the organs of executed prisoners.
DAVID MATAS: And that’s my view, that Huang Jiefu, by being responsible for an ethical system and himself participating in transplants, which, as far as I’m concerned, are more than likely to be unethical themselves, has engaged in unethical behaviour and therefore the professorship should be revoked for that reason.
MARIA FIATARONE SINGH: We should be the first, we should step up as the oldest university in Australia, as a beacon of intellectual freedom and those kinds of things, we should lead the way and say it’s wrong, it’s inappropriate. We shouldn’t be honouring this – we shouldn’t be putting him shoulder to shoulder with Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Desmond Tutu. It’s wrong.
LEIGH SALES: Adam Harvey with that report.