Tales from the Organ Trade

It is one of the great miracles of modern medicine,

the saving of a dying patient with a transplanted body part.

HEART MONITOR

But there is a worldwide shortage of organs

and a surplus of poor people

who believe that the solution to their suffering

is not to receive an organ,

but to sell one.

ROCK MUSIC

MUSIC

DRAMATIC MUSIC

TRAFFIC

Joboy, a 44-year-old husband and father

yearns to lift his family from abject poverty.

He has decided to sell one of his kidneys.

His home is a crawl space under someone else’s shack.

It’s too small to stand up in.

And there's no electricity.

COCKS FIGHTING

In the Philippines, like almost everywhere else on earth,

selling a part of your body is illegal.

The result is a flourishing black market,

run by backstreet brokers like Diane.

Like most brokers,

Diane sold one of her own kidneys

and served as the agent for a dozen members

of her extended family when they sold theirs.

Diane has offered Joboy two thousand five hundred dollars,

double what he'd earn from unskilled labour in a year.

All they need now is someone who is desperately ill.

Every year, all over the world,

thousands of people like Joboy make the same decision.

50 years ago it wasn't possible

to take one kidney from another to save a life.

Now it's almost routine.

We are born with two.

With proper care, we can live and thrive with one.

But the demand for this organ far exceeds the supply,

so many desperate patients turn to the black market where,

in some countries,

you can pick up a kidney for the price of a laptop.

HEART MONITOR

CAR ENGINE

I was diagnosed at 21

that I had kidney failure.

Generally when this happens, it happens when you’re older.

Of course you go into denial and you think,

'No way, this can’t be happening to me.'

I'm just trying to live,

the life I think I would have lived

if this didn't happen.

Mary Jo has been waiting for a kidney transplant for 6 years.

She's kept alive on dialysis.

Dialysis, what it does is, I mean it cleans your blood

but it's not just taking out the toxins,

it's taking out everything.

So, anything good that’s in yourbody as well

comes out at the same time.

So, you know, you're wiped out.

When you get off you're completely wiped out, so it

I mean, it takes its toll.

DOG BARKING

Sorry Hun, I locked it.

Oh that's okay.

I've got stuff happening all the time.

I've got a 3-year-old kid who's got special needs.

I've got a husband, I've got a house,

I've got a career.

If I want to do the things, I've always wanted to do.

I still want to travel, I want to

I want to live my life.

So this is my dialysis machine.

Doing dialysis is a very traumatizing experience

for anybody. It took me, I'd say a good year to really

get used to sticking sharp needles in my arm.

You have to do dialysis every other day.

It just changes you.

It changes the way you look at things;

it changes your way of life,

your perspective on things

and how you would do things normally.

This one hurts.

HEART MONITOR

You can't stay on this machine forever.

It doesn't do what a kidney does.

Some days I think,

'God, how much longer am I going to have to do this?'

I would love to have a living donor if that was possible.

This is it,

Unless somebody offers me a kidney, or unless, uh

a cadaver becomes available.

This is what keeps me alive.

MUSIC

There’s no point in having a bad attitude.

You put up with what you have to put up with

and there's no point in complaining about it.

It's a matter of just uh…

what you have to deal with.

I'm effectively between a rock and a hard place.

If I can get a transplant in the next year or two,

I will probably live another 20, 25 years.

If I,

you know, don’t manage to maintain my health

long enough to get a transplant

and they take me off the transplant list,

I'll be dead in 8 years, probably.

It's not living, um… it’s existing.

So Walter,

how long have you been on the transplant list already?

- Uh… almost 2 years. - Wow.

What do I have, probably 2 or 3 years before

I probably have problems?

Currently, people that have - were

put on the transplant list that at the time you were,

they're waiting anywhere from 4 to 5 years

for a kidney to become available

unless they have a living donor. - Right.

Patients who are on dialysis have an increased mortality.

And that mortality hasn't changed

in the last 15, 20 years.

As a doctor, if you're in a clinic of a hundred people

that you’re treating,

20 of those people

are going to die each year.

each year.

I effectively have to decide

at this point whether,

you know, if I can’t find a donor in this country

fairly soon,

I have to decide whether I’m willing to

take on my soul,

the ethical burden of purchasing a kidney from somebody.

Or choose to die.

And that is really the choice I’m facing.

POTS CLATTERING

Waiting for him to get to the top of the list

of... - Which I ain’t going to make.

- of transplant, uh cadaver transplants,

just doesn’t seem like it’s going to happen.

And you know, it’s,

yeah, I mean a foreign situation

obviously would not be our first choice

but at this point it looks like it may be our only choice.

In Toronto,

Raul Fain already made the choice

that Walter is considering.

He mortgaged his house,

went overseas

and paid 100,000 Dollars for a kidney.

- Where was this minaret, downtown?

Across from the hotel.

Oh here is

how I look after the second day of surgery

and my muscles have disappeared and I’ve lost about

- The muscles disappeared before the surgery.

That’s what renal failure does.

Let me see this one.

Approximately 10 years ago I was

diagnosed with a kidney disease.

After about nine years my specialist suggested

my specialist suggested that he’s really not able to

to help me much more.

So I started to inquire about doing a transplant overseas.

I had one ray of sunshine

hat through some family members,

it was transmitted to me that there was a gentleman

that had this operation in Israel.

When he got the news that

there may be

a possibility to go out of the country we just jumped.

And when I contacted this person

he explained to me that the surgery

does not take place in Israel.

Then it was Turkey. Which I said okay, Turkey is already,

it's not a backward country,

it's modern and so on.

He also informed me that

there were some problems in Turkey

and the whole operation

has had to move to

to Kosovo.

The Turkey clinic has been closed.

We have to go to Kosovo,

so whatever we were prepared for

we were not prepared for Kosovo.

Kosovo is Europe's newest country,

an orphaned slice of the former Yugoslavia

corroded by corruption,

and strangled by organized crime.

When Raul travelled to Kosovo

for his black market kidney transplant,

he had no idea he was about to become embroiled

in one of the world’s most infamous organ trafficking rings

an organization now being investigated

by the European Union.

RUNNING

Jonathan Ratel is a prosecutor

and a veteran of trouble spots like Iraq and Afghanistan.

He has now been sent to Kosovo to crack down on organized crime

and corruption.