Black-market kidney surgery offers no guarantees

One of the more desperate forms of "medical tourism"--going abroad for a black-market kidney transplant--can result in souvenirs that include surgical complications, systemic fungal infections and compromised grafts that in some cases require nephrectomy, leaving the patients back at square one or even dead, say a group of investigators presenting at the World Transplant Congress in Boston this week. They reported the outcomes of 22 Canadians who purchased a kidney abroad, in the Middle East or Asia, and then returned to Canada for care after the transplant. Of those patients, 33 had no medical documentation of the procedures, and the remaining 77 percent often had incomplete records. One third required immediate hospitalization, primarily for sepsis. Two patients required allograft nephrectomy. Compared with a control group that had received transplants domestically, the transplant tourists had significantly worse three-year survival rates, too.

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