Kidney racket: Botched pairing puts recipients at mortal risk

KANPUR: The probe into the inter-state organ racket busted by UP Police following a complaint by a Kanpur-based electrician’s wife in February this year has revealed startling facts on how donors were shown as near or distant relatives by staff of two Delhi-based hospitals to prove matching of human leukocyte antigens (HLA) with that of the recipient.
Medical staff of Delhi-based Pushpawati Singhania Research Institute (PSRI) and Fortis, Faridabad, and several middlemen have been arrested from various places in the last three months in connection with the racket.
The Kanpur police have found that in none of the four cases being probed, donor and recipient bear any genetic or family relation.
Graft survival is superior in pairs where both donor and recipient have the same serologically defined HLA antigens, which is known as HLA matching.
What has worried the UP cops is the death of a Lakhmirpur Kheri recipient, a farmer named Kamal Chauhan, within few months of his liver transplant surgery, even before the probe began.
Sources in Kanpur police said that cops will now be seeking an expert opinion from authorised medical practitioner on the fitness of both donors and recipients.
A wider belief in organ transplant surgery is that the impact of HLA mismatch between donor and potential recipient extends time for transplantation therapy, reduces graft survival and increases mortality.
The cases under scrutiny by UP Police include the one where a woman was being forced to change religious identity while a fake father-son pair was created before medical board of PSRI.
“In case of Bulandshahr, the donor is shown as Sanskar Aggarwal, who is donating kidney to his father Anil on paper. In reality, the donor is someone from a poor background lured into the transplant business,” said sources. The modus operandi used by the middlemen in Delhi, Kanpur and Lucknow along with hospital staff was through six means.
This included: showing death of all possible near-relatives of the recipient except donor, replacing photographs of fake donors with that of real ones in Aadhaar cards, fake entries in bank passbook, super-imposing photographs of recipients in donor family albums, induction of donors in family trees of recipients from religious place and generating fake domiciles.
“We were fortunate that the original complainant Sangeeta ran away from Ghaziabad after the middleman, Junaid, who tempted her into taking up a job in Delhi, forced her for a medical check up with a follow up offer of Rs 4 lakh to change her name to Shakina Bano as her recipient was going to be from the other religion,” said a top cop.
The probe is being led by Kanpur Police SIT comprising SP (Crime) Rajesh Yadav, DSPs Geetanjali Singh and Saifuddin and Inspector Anurag Mishra.