The Philippine government on Tuesday announced a total ban on kidney transplants for foreign patients a month after it approved the policy to end the illegal sale of human organs. The Department of Health (DOH) suspended organ transplantation for foreigners last January as it drafted the new policy which also paved the way for the creation of a board that will set the guidelines on all organ-transplant procedures in the Philippines. Health Undersecretary Alex Padilla said the total ban was a decision of the Philippine Board for Organ Donation and Transplantation (PBODT) created last month through a new Administrative Order covering transplant procedures. Padilla said the ban is a strategy to end the black market in kidney transplant operations in the Philippines among foreign recipients. He said the new policy is in accordance with the stand of the World Health Organization (WHO) against foreign transplantation. The DOH earlier stopped some 10 hospitals nationwide from performing kidney transplants after they violated the 10-percent quota imposed for foreign patients. There are 22 hospitals in the Philippines that are capable of performing transplants. Under an old DOH Administrative Order, each hospital is allowed to allocate only 10 percent of their transplant surgeries to foreign patients and the rest of the slots must be allocated to Filipino patients. Dr. Enrique Ona, president of the Philippine Society of Transplant Surgeons and director of the DOH-run National Kidney and Transplant Institute, welcomed the measure. “That's a welcome move because that is the response of the board to the commercialization of transplantation,” he added. The administrative order, signed by Health Secretary Francisco Duque III in March said “kidney transplantation is not part of medical tourism.” Since 2005, when the government ventured in medical tourism, various health facilities have opened their services to foreign patients in a bid to make the Philippines not only a tourist spot but also a medical destination. From 2006 to 2007, about 200,000 patients from countries that include the United States and its territories, South Pacific nations, Canada, Korea and Japan, have come to the Philippines for medical tourism. Between 10,000 to 12,500 Filipinos develop end stage renal disease annually and about 50 percent to 60 percent of them are kidney-transplant candidates. However, less than 10 percent are given transplants because of insufficient supply and the failure of patients to raise money for the procedure. Filipino kidneys were considered the cheapest priced in the thriving global black market in organ sales, according to a non-profit organization against child trafficking. The Asia Against Child Trafficking said poor Filipinos who sell their kidneys to foreign clients were actually being shortchanged. The organization disclosed in a recent press conference that in the Philippines, kidney vendors get a measly $1,500 or roughly 125,000 pesos — a price 20 times cheaper than those in the United States. The asking price in the US starts at $30,000 while kidney vendors get as much as $10,000 to $20,000 in Israel; $7,500 in Turkey, $6,000 in Brazil and $2,700 in Moldova and Romania, Abueva said. The figures she disclosed during the press briefing was gathered from a recent study conducted by Nancy Scheper-Hughes, a medical anthropology professor at the University of California, Berkeley and the director of Organs Watch, a center that documents the global traffic in organs. __
