Average Wait Time for a Liver Transplant is One Week—but There’s a Catch
In an earlier post I mentioned the enormous diversity of concepts presented at Santa Barbara’s magnificent Earth Day celebration last Saturday. I was just going through my notes and ran across this fine example: Stop Organ Pillaging in China. Apparently, because of the incredible profit associated with killing people and selling their organs to people in need of transplants, China engages in “forced organ harvesting,” where death row inmates and prisoners of conscience are executed, and their organs (corneas, livers, kidneys, lungs, hearts, etc.) are sold to supply the demands of the world market, normally at prices between $100K and $200K. A report, in 21 languages, is available here.
The title to this post: “Average Wait Time for a Liver Transplant is One Week” was quoted on the website of the Shanghai 2nd Military Medical University Hospital. The advertisement is now deleted, but archived here.
In addition to validating the organizers and sponsors of the Earth Day event, I bring this up to point out the fact that you and I live among people who are morally capable of running businesses like this (or human trafficking, or any of dozens of others). What’s the common denominator? A cold indifference to the suffering of others. This one may shock you (it certainly did me). But ask yourself: How different are the people whose life work is deliberately obscuring the science associated with our environmental decay and destroying the health and safety of all seven billion people living here on Earth– so they can parlay their few billion dollars of net worth into tens of billions?
