China executes about 8000 people a year with the organs of executed prisoners the raw materials for a growing organ transplant industry.
Hundreds of well-off Japanese and other nationals are turning to China's burgeoning human organ transplant industry, paying tens of thousands of pounds for livers and kidneys, which in some cases have been harvested from executed prisoners and sold to hospitals.
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And it's not just the small private hospitals and clinics springing up all over the country - even bigger hospitals in the capital Beijing and the business hub of Shanghai have adverts in toilet cubicles and on the walls of wards.
I don't think they ever saw this. Female kidney turns lumberjack on to housework.
Nor this. Very often recipients of a transplant take on the personality characteristics of the donor according to Gary Schwartz, a professor of psychology at the University of Arizona.
In one such case, a young dancer received a heart-and-lung transplant. Before the operation, she had been very health-conscious; yet, the very first thing she did on leaving the hospital was to head for a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet, and wolf down an order of chicken nuggets‹something she would never have done before. Her personality changed, too: she became aggressive and impetuous whereas, before, she had been calm and conservative.
She decided to investigate and, after much battling against the medical bureaucracy, she discovered that her heart lung donor was an 18-year-old man who had died in a motorcycle accident. He had been an aggressive and impetuous lad who had a passion for Kentucky Fried Chicken‹in fact, uneaten KFC nuggets had been found in his motorcycle jacket on the very day of his death.
Another notable case is that of an eight-year-old girl who had received the heart of a 10-year-old girl who had been brutally murdered. After the transplant, the recipient began to experience horrifying nightmares. Her dreams were consistently about being murdered, and they were so traumatic that a psychiatrist was called in to help. What he heard convinced him that the girl was describing the actual circumstances of her donor¹s murder. When the details were given to the police, these proved to be so accurate that the killer was easily identified and apprehended.