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Organ Trafficking: How Germans Buy New Kidneys in Kenya
Germans in need of new kidneys are heading to Kenya to buy one. The donors are frequently suffering from bitter poverty. Behind the scheme is an Israeli whom the authorities have been after for years.
www.spiegel.de
The shock. That is perhaps the best place to start. The realization that time had run out. For her kidney and for life as she had known it. The letter arrived on May 23, 2022, and it marked the end of the almost 30 years she had lived with her first donor kidney. The envelope contained the results of a blood test. Her creatinine value was 3.6, far above the norm of around 1. She knew then that the organ wouldn’t last much longer.
Sabine Fischer-Kugler hung on for another year, as she recalls – drinking less and consuming less protein and potassium. Then, her doctor called with new test results. Her creatinine level was now over 6. The doctor told her to get ready and the taxi arrived half an hour later to take her to the place she had never wanted to return: the dialysis station. Three times a week, five hours each time. For several years, most likely – as long as it would take to slowly climb the long waiting list in Germany of thousands of people waiting for a new kidney, growing weaker all the while.
Perhaps that is the right way to start to understand just how far a person is willing to go to get a new kidney. All the way to Kenya. All the way to the outer limits of morality – and beyond. And how far a new kidney must travel such that Sabine Fischer-Kugler, 57 years old, can continue living as before. In her case, it was a kidney from the Caucasus in the body of a young man who flew to Kenya to have it removed so that he could then fly home presumably with a couple of thousand euros in his pocket.
"Why not look abroad? The main thing is I once again have a kidney and don’t have to go back on dialysis,” says Fischer-Kugler, back in her living room in northern Bavaria six weeks later. Her surgery took place on February 4, and everything has been great since then. Her creatinine value is back to 0.67. "It’s a young kidney, as you can immediately see in the ultrasound. It’s totally healthy.” And how is the donor doing, down to just one kidney, six weeks later? She doesn’t know. She doesn’t even know the donor’s name, nor does she want to.
That, too, is part of the story when a kidney becomes just another commodity, when supply and demand is dictated by desperation on both sides, when unscrupulous middlemen and doctors extract money from the global system of kidney capitalism. It is a business that is just as incompatible with too much knowledge as it is with too much conscience. One that operates because of the need, and because of the benefits and the profits it produces.
DER SPIEGEL, German public broadcaster ZDF and Deutsche Well teamed up over the course of several months to follow the organ trail. From Germany and Poland via Israel to the clinic in Eldoret, Kenya, that is currently in the center of an international and seemingly criminal kidney trade. The transactions and transplants link patients in Germany with donors in Caucasus nations like Azerbaijan. And it links prosperous Somalians with young Kenyans who are talked into earning a quick 2,000 to 5,000 euros for one of their kidneys, while patients in the West pay up to 200,000 euros to the organ traders – preferably in cash.
Site visitors are directed to "click on the following links” to learn what the service costs. Once they do so, they end up in a WhatsApp chat that ultimately leads to a man without a last name – because on the path to the shady world of the organ merchants, a first name has to be sufficient.
The location of the company’s headquarters – which claims to "focus on empathy and efficiency” – also remains concealed. The address provided in the imprint leads to a construction site in Warsaw. The high rise that once stood there was demolished in 2023. The "consulting and service agreement” that Fischer-Kugler signed with Medlead, meanwhile, indicates that the company is located at an address in Warsaw not far from the airport. But nobody there has ever heard of the company, neither in the ground-floor pizzeria nor on the two floors above it.
On YouTube and Facebook, though, the organ merchants are much easier to find. Under hashtags like #Nierentransplantation (kidney transplant) and #Erfolgsgeschichten (success stories), German patients gush about the medical wonderland of Kenya. Frank the real-estate salesman, Isabelle the business consultant and Ingo the heating engineer all look directly into the camera as they enthusiastically describe their path out of the "dialysis prison.” Some of them even provide a bit of dubious advice: "I can only urge anyone suffering from kidney failure in Germany: Don’t sit around waiting for some law you think will mean you’ll get a replacement organ more quickly.”
Not a single recipient speaks about the money they had to pay and what may have become of that cash. And only one of them sounds like he believes the story that Medlead would like people to believe: that the kidneys come from donors who provide their organs solely out of the goodness of their hearts for the desperate people who receive them. The narrative holds that there are selfless organ donors from poor countries who are lining up to have Medlead slice their kidneys out of their bodies – even as transplant centers in wealthy countries like Germany are unable to find enough people who are prepared to donate their kidneys even after death.
It all looks like the setting for a rather unspectacular lifestyle. And she says that’s all she has ever wanted: a normal life. Just that her illness – diagnosed when she was just 16 years old – meant that such a life was impossible. An examination at the time determined that something wasn’t right with her kidneys. Her creatinine values were rising and, by the time she was 20, thrice weekly dialysis sessions were her only hope. Including the drive to Ansbach and back home, each trip took six-and-a-half hours.
Article continues
www.spiegel.de
Sabine Fischer-Kugler hung on for another year, as she recalls – drinking less and consuming less protein and potassium. Then, her doctor called with new test results. Her creatinine level was now over 6. The doctor told her to get ready and the taxi arrived half an hour later to take her to the place she had never wanted to return: the dialysis station. Three times a week, five hours each time. For several years, most likely – as long as it would take to slowly climb the long waiting list in Germany of thousands of people waiting for a new kidney, growing weaker all the while.
Perhaps that is the right way to start to understand just how far a person is willing to go to get a new kidney. All the way to Kenya. All the way to the outer limits of morality – and beyond. And how far a new kidney must travel such that Sabine Fischer-Kugler, 57 years old, can continue living as before. In her case, it was a kidney from the Caucasus in the body of a young man who flew to Kenya to have it removed so that he could then fly home presumably with a couple of thousand euros in his pocket.
"Why not look abroad? The main thing is I once again have a kidney and don’t have to go back on dialysis,” says Fischer-Kugler, back in her living room in northern Bavaria six weeks later. Her surgery took place on February 4, and everything has been great since then. Her creatinine value is back to 0.67. "It’s a young kidney, as you can immediately see in the ultrasound. It’s totally healthy.” And how is the donor doing, down to just one kidney, six weeks later? She doesn’t know. She doesn’t even know the donor’s name, nor does she want to.
That, too, is part of the story when a kidney becomes just another commodity, when supply and demand is dictated by desperation on both sides, when unscrupulous middlemen and doctors extract money from the global system of kidney capitalism. It is a business that is just as incompatible with too much knowledge as it is with too much conscience. One that operates because of the need, and because of the benefits and the profits it produces.
DER SPIEGEL, German public broadcaster ZDF and Deutsche Well teamed up over the course of several months to follow the organ trail. From Germany and Poland via Israel to the clinic in Eldoret, Kenya, that is currently in the center of an international and seemingly criminal kidney trade. The transactions and transplants link patients in Germany with donors in Caucasus nations like Azerbaijan. And it links prosperous Somalians with young Kenyans who are talked into earning a quick 2,000 to 5,000 euros for one of their kidneys, while patients in the West pay up to 200,000 euros to the organ traders – preferably in cash.
Kidneys from the Online Shop
It all sounds like a shadowy industry, well out of the public eye and so secret that one might think even the operating room lights have to be dimmed. But that is not the case. Kidneys from Kenya are offered openly on the internet – in German on a website registered in Germany. Beneath a photo of a man with graying hair in a white lab coat, a stethoscope around his neck, the company promises something that is – legally – virtually impossible anywhere in the world: a "kidney transplant within just four to six weeks.”Site visitors are directed to "click on the following links” to learn what the service costs. Once they do so, they end up in a WhatsApp chat that ultimately leads to a man without a last name – because on the path to the shady world of the organ merchants, a first name has to be sufficient.
The location of the company’s headquarters – which claims to "focus on empathy and efficiency” – also remains concealed. The address provided in the imprint leads to a construction site in Warsaw. The high rise that once stood there was demolished in 2023. The "consulting and service agreement” that Fischer-Kugler signed with Medlead, meanwhile, indicates that the company is located at an address in Warsaw not far from the airport. But nobody there has ever heard of the company, neither in the ground-floor pizzeria nor on the two floors above it.
On YouTube and Facebook, though, the organ merchants are much easier to find. Under hashtags like #Nierentransplantation (kidney transplant) and #Erfolgsgeschichten (success stories), German patients gush about the medical wonderland of Kenya. Frank the real-estate salesman, Isabelle the business consultant and Ingo the heating engineer all look directly into the camera as they enthusiastically describe their path out of the "dialysis prison.” Some of them even provide a bit of dubious advice: "I can only urge anyone suffering from kidney failure in Germany: Don’t sit around waiting for some law you think will mean you’ll get a replacement organ more quickly.”
Not a single recipient speaks about the money they had to pay and what may have become of that cash. And only one of them sounds like he believes the story that Medlead would like people to believe: that the kidneys come from donors who provide their organs solely out of the goodness of their hearts for the desperate people who receive them. The narrative holds that there are selfless organ donors from poor countries who are lining up to have Medlead slice their kidneys out of their bodies – even as transplant centers in wealthy countries like Germany are unable to find enough people who are prepared to donate their kidneys even after death.
Unknown Doctors and a Dubious Company
Fischer-Kugler also isn’t particularly eager to talk about money. Just a few months after her transplant, the AOK administrator is sitting in her kitchen, decorated in warm brown tones, with a paneled ceiling and a flower-patterned cloth on the table. The windowsill is weighed down by knick-knacks. "When light appears, the darkness recedes,” reads the motto printed on the flower vase.It all looks like the setting for a rather unspectacular lifestyle. And she says that’s all she has ever wanted: a normal life. Just that her illness – diagnosed when she was just 16 years old – meant that such a life was impossible. An examination at the time determined that something wasn’t right with her kidneys. Her creatinine values were rising and, by the time she was 20, thrice weekly dialysis sessions were her only hope. Including the drive to Ansbach and back home, each trip took six-and-a-half hours.
Article continues
Organ Trafficking: How Germans Buy New Kidneys in Kenya
Germans in need of new kidneys are heading to Kenya to buy one. The donors are frequently suffering from bitter poverty. Behind the scheme is an Israeli whom the authorities have been after for years.
www.spiegel.de
Also Kenya:
FREE HAITI from the continuous harm of Judeo-Christianity
Meanwhile for decades:
Them DEVILS continue to show they’re a cancer to the world.
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