By Chiru Murage

There is a call for the Ministry of Health to establish protocols preventing the sale of Iranian kidneys to foreign patients. The Ministry, however, blames society for this problem. Doctors in Iran are thousands of dollars to carry out transplants on patients that come with fake documents to the country in search of people willing to sell their organs. Kidney donation to foreign nationals is illegal in Iran, so there is often a middleman that provides fake documents and matches organ buyers with sellers. Most foreign patients going to Iran for illegal organ transplants are mostly from Saudi Arabia, Persian Gulf countries, Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, and India. Rising poverty in Iran has caused a jump in numbers of people selling their kidneys on the black market. More than 2,300 kidney transplants are completed every year in Iran, and it is becoming more difficult to sort out and find the ones that are carried out illegally.

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