Surgeon says rich Indians have tricked him in kidney transplants

Press, 12 November 1985, Page 10

Surgeon says rich Indians have tricked him in kidney transplants

NZPA-AP London A British surgeon says that he has been duped twice by wealthy Indian patients who tricked him into giving them transplants of kidneys they bought from slum-dwellers in Bombay after swearing in affidavits that the donors were relatives. Michael Bewick, a consultant at Guy’s Hospital, in London, said that patients from India had also tricked other British surgeons into performing transplants. During a recent visit to Bombay he had seen one donor, living in a hovel who had received an alarm clock and another gift in return for a kidney. He urged the British Medical Council, the governing ethical body, to set up a committee to scrutinise all kidney transplant patients from India, and possibly also those from Pakistan.

He said that Indian lawyers collaborated/ in drawing up phoney affidavits. “Indian patients should be refused unless tissue tests prove the donors are relatives,” he said.

“I am not going to subject a slum-dweller, who in effect becomes a sort of slave to the system out there, to an operation he could well do without,” Dr Bewick said.

He acknowledged that donors could live normal lifespans with only one kidney. Dr Bewick went to Bombay recently after the London newspaper, the “Mail on Sunday,” investigated what it said was a racket under which rich Indians arrived in Britain with donors picked from lines of slumdwellers prepared to sell a kidney. The donors were offered between £2OOO ($4860) and £4OOO ($9720), the paper reported. A report from Bombay published in the paper showed Dr Bewick confronting a patient — identified as Ansuya Bagla, the wife of a Calcutta businessman — in a Bombay hospital where she was having tests. The report said that Bagla had hoped to be operated on by Dr Bewick in Britain, receiving an organ bought from a slum-dweller. Mr Bagla was quoted as saying that buying an organ from the poor was “very common” in India. Dr Bewick has refused to operate on Mrs Bagla, and said that he would never have performed the other operations if he had known the truth. He did not know how many Indians had had such kidney transplants in Britain. . x