The Hyderabad police Task Force has busted an international kidney racket with the arrest of five people who worked as broker between the unrelated donors, recipients and a few corporate hospitals in the city. Kamalasan Reddy, the deputy commissioner of police Task Force, told a news conference in Hyderabad that the racket, targeting the innocent people coming to the city from rural areas was operating for the last five years and arranged innumerable kidney “donations” in violation of the AP Transplantation of Human Organs Act 1994. “The recipients were charged Rs400,000 to 500,000 for a kidney and almost 150,000 would be taken away by the brokers and remaining would be shared by the doctors and others with a very small amount going to the donor,” he said. Giving the details of the modus operandi of the gang, which operated in Andhra Pradesh, Maharahstra and some other states, Kamalasan Reddy said that to overcome the condition of the act that the donor and recipients should be blood relatives, the gang would create fake documents and hand them over to the hospitals where operation would be carried out. “In case of donor being a woman, the gang would arrange documents like ration cards and marriage certificate to prove that the donor was the wife of the recipient and the couple did not have any children,” he said. If the donor was projected as a blood relative of the recipient, both the persons will be sent for HLA or Human leukocyte antigen test. “If there is a 50% match between the two sides, they are accepted as blood relatives. But in most cases it did not match as they were not blood relatives. “But the brokers would take the HLA certificate and manipulate it through scanning and printers in such a way that all the negatives markings will be turned into positive helping the hospitals to carry out the kidney transplant,” he said. Under the human organ transplant act, a high level authorization committee headed by director, medical education will have to be convinced that the unrelated donor was giving his kidney out of genuine concern for the patient and it was not for commercial consideration. “In such cases the brokers will tutor the donors a lot to make them convincing enough for the committee to give it green signal,” said Kamlasan Reddy. “But as in most cases the committee rejected such applications, the brokers resorted to the other methods,” he said Kamalasan Reddy said that many of the beneficiaries of this racket were foreigners. The police were investigating the role of at least five corporate hospitals in this racket. __
