A Saudi surgeon cautioned patients against having liver transplants in China. Professor Mohammad Al-Subail, head of the Liver Surgery and Transplantation Department at King Faisal Specialist Hospital in Riyadh, told Saudi Arabic-language newspapers that patients should not make rash decisions and just travel to China to undergo liver transplants there. Saubail's warnings came after the hospital's liver transplant program had recently received several patients who developed serious health complications after returning from liver transplant surgeries in China. He told the London-based Arabic daily Al-Hayat that Chinese liver transplantation centers operate on patients without checking their health conditions or looking into the rates of success of their operations in the near term. Subail added that in the case of patients with advanced tumors, the tumors tend to recur less than a year after the surgery. “These centers (in China) should not be allowed to make huge profits off patients, and strict medical criteria should be applied before sending patients to China”, he said. Subail added that monitoring the health conditions of liver patients at the hospital's liver clinic in the first year following the surgery showed that chances of the survival of 50 percent of the patients were slim. He said that most organs transplanted in China were taken from individuals sentenced to death and forced into donating. __
