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A study published in an American medical journal has claimed that surgeons working at state-run civilian and military hospitals in China executed numerous prisoners over a period of decades by removing their hearts for transplant purposes.
The authors of the study, published in the American Journal of Transplantation, identified 71 Chinese medical journal publications dated between 1980 and 2015 describing cases in which the removal of the heart appeared to be the cause of the prisoner’s death.
In these cases, the prisoners were supposedly braindead before surgeons removed their hearts. “Braindead” is a classification referring to someone who will never regain consciousness or start breathing on their own again without a ventilator.
But the authors of the latest study—Matthew Robertson from the Australian National University and Dr. Jacob Lavee, a cardiac transplant surgeon at the Sheba Medical Center in Israel—said the evidence they have uncovered suggests this was not the case.
The researchers said their findings indicate that the operations were unethical because they breached the “dead donor rule.”
“The dead donor rule is fundamental to transplant ethics,” the authors wrote in the study. “The rule states that organ procurement must not commence until the donor is both dead and formally pronounced so, and by the same token, that procurement of organs must not cause the death of the donor.”