AT LEAST 20 Scots transplant patients have bought kidneys sold by poverty-stricken Pakistani donors.
The "transplant tourists" paid up to £80,000 each to fly to Pakistan, jumping the NHS waiting list for the potentially life-saving operation.
And after the patients returned home, NHS doctors were forced to prescribe them expensive drugs to stop their bodies rejecting the new kidneys.
One of the transplant tourists has since died and the bodies of more than a third of the patients have rejected their donor kidneys.
Doctors in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dundee tracked down the transplant tourists by identifying people who needed anti-rejection drugs even though they hadn't had transplants in Britain. The records suggested that at least 20 Scots had flown to Pakistan for transplants.
Dr Andrew Henderson, a kidney consultant at Ninewells Hospital in Dundee, condemned transplant tourism as "morally wrong".
He added that patients who had transplants abroad faced higher risks of death or serious infection and had no way of knowing that the donors who provided their kidneys had been properly cared for. Dr Henderson's colleague Dr Stewart Rodger, of the Western Infirmary in Glasgow, called for more donor organs to be made available in Britain to remove the temptation to go abroad.
More than 700 Scots are on the waiting list for kidney transplants and 115 people have died since 2003 while waiting for donor organs.
An estimated 5000 live kidneys are sold every year in Pakistan. The country has become the world centre of "transplant tourism" because it has no law to ban the trade in organs.
People in the poorest areas of Pakistan sell their kidneys for as little as £700 each. They use the cash to settle debts or pay for treatment. One of Pakistan's leading kidney experts, Dr Jaffer Naqvi, said: "In Pakistan people consider their dead as very sacred so no one wants to donate their organs.
"It is always the poor who end up selling kidneys."
Estimates suggest that up to half of the 3000 patients given new kidneys in Pakistan every year are foreigners.
Many have their ops at private clinics in the city of Rawalpindi. It's believed hundred suffer serious complications
SOURCE:
http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/