GO TO SOURCE


STATE COLLEGE, PENNSYLVANIA, October 1, 2002: A recent study found that people in southern India who hoped to escape poverty by selling a kidney were often worse off financially and less healthy after surgery. Dr. Madhav Goyal, a State college-based internist with the Geisinger Health system, found that a majority of donors were women and that at least some were forced by their husbands to sell their kidneys. “We were expecting that they would break even. We didn’t expect that they would be worse off,” says Goyal, whose study appears in Wednesday’s Journal of the American Medical Association. Interviews with 305 kidney donors in the city of Chennai found: Ninety-six percent sold their kidneys to pay off debt. Donors were promised an average of $1,410 for a kidney but received an average of $1,070. Some were paid as little as $450. The average family income of donors dropped from $660 at the time of the operation to $420 at the time of the survey, mainly because of the health consequences. Of the 292 who sold to pay off debts, 216 still had debts at the time of the survey.

Post Views: 199