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A potential boom in the sale of certain vital organs, such as the kidney in the country propelled mainly by poverty is raising eyebrows among medical practitioners, who hold the view that a regulation is needed urgently to forestall a chaotic situation.

Akpah Sylvester, project coordinator, Firm Health Ghana Foundation, a Tarkwa based non-governmental organisation, aimed at promoting good kidney health through education, advocacy and support for assistance to get a buyer, told Weekend Finder that on a weekly basis, he receives calls from individuals who are willing to sell-off one of their kidneys.

According to him, his assessment of many of the people who call wanting to sell their kidneys are often people who are in dire need of money to solve one need or the other.

“I can tell you that many of the people willing to sell their kidneys are being pushed by poverty,” he noted.
He said, just about a week ago, he had calls from two individuals who were willing to sell their kidneys at a price ranging from $6,000-$10,000.

“But for many of them they are willing to take anything to solve one problem or the other”, he noted.

He, however, emphasised that many of them rethink their intent after they are taken through the procedures and conditions they must fulfil before their kidneys can be transferred to a recipient.

A little over a month ago, Weekend Finder reported of a similar case of a young man, who was virtually going blind due to a condition and was offering to sell one of his kidneys to save his sight. All he was asking for in exchange of his kidney was an amount that would help restore his eye sight.

Sylvester however, contends that the lack of national guidelines to regulate the modalities for donating human organs for transplant could generate a rather chaotic organs market in the country.

Checks conducted by Weekend Finder indicate that the Bill intended to regulate organ and tissue transplant in the country has been locked up at the Attorney General’s Office for over five years now.

Mr Enoch Opoku Gyimah, a founding member of the Ghana Kidney foundation, says the most important thing to do now as a country is to intensify awareness about the Kidney disease, as a lot would have to be done as a country to attain the level where Kidneys could be harvested and transferred.

He noted that transplants performed at the Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital were kidneys harvested and transferred from relatives of the recipients in accordance with the Istanbul Declaration.

The Declaration of Istanbul was created at the Istanbul Summit on Organ Trafficking and Transplant Tourism held from April 30 to May 1 2008 in Istanbul, Turkey. The Declaration clarifies the issues of transplant tourism, trafficking and commercialism and provides ethical guidelines for practice in organ donation and transplantation. Since the creation of the declaration, over 100 countries have endorsed the principles (source: Wikipedia).

According to him, Ghanaians would have to be well educated on the issues surrounding Kidney harvesting and transplanting, before an attempt is made to set up a Kidney Bank or else the country risks having an organ market where organs would be up for sale.

Organ Transplants save and transform lives; but the only way to get an organ is to take it from someone else, and this has produced a quite distinctive set of moral and practical problems.
Not surprisingly, people have strong feelings about their organs, and ever since they understood that parts of their own bodies could be transferred to others, they have demanded explicit rights to control their use.

Each year, the conditions of thousands of people suffering from kidney malfunction deteriorate and die because the organs that could save them are not available, but transplantation scandals are hardly ever about lives unnecessarily lost: they are about organs said to have been improperly procured. Those are the stories that really stir up the public, and cause donation rates to drop in some countries that have a list of recipients and donors.

Statistics obtained from the Renal Dialysis Unit of the Police Hospital, indicate that the number of people put on dialysis at the hospital’s facility alone increased from 1,000 in 2013 to 2,000 in 2014.

Statistics also indicate that there were over 8,000 kidney cases in the country as at last year with an alarming number being the youth.