Wanna buy my kidney?

September 16, 2005

Vienna -- A 38-year-old unemployed man from Vienna has offered to sell one of his kidneys for €150 000 ($183 000) to fund the purchase of an apartment, a report said on Thursday.

"Special offer. Who needs my kidney? Healthy, non-smoker. Fixed price: €150 000," read the advertisement he posted in the city's underground railway network, Heute newspaper reported.

The man named only as Josef V told the newspaper he hoped to buy an apartment in Vienna, lease it to someone else and live off the proceeds so he would not have to seek work.

A television programme about kidney donors gave him the idea, he said.

But Austrian authorities are likely to take a dim view of jobless Josef's pension scheme. While organ donations are permitted in Austria, sales are banned.

In July, an unemployed German man offered to sell a kidney for €400 000 on internet auction site Ebay. He faces charges of contravening German laws on organ transplantation after the auction was halted.

An Ebay kidney auction in the United States 1999, believed to be a hoax, reached almost $6m before Ebay executives stopped the sale.

About 40 000 Europeans are waiting for kidney transplants while 120 000 receive dialysis treatment, according to a World Health Organisation report in 2004.

Organ trafficking, often referred to as transplant tourism, is on the rise because of a growing shortage of human material, the organisation says.

But while brokers typically charged wealthy patients between $100 000 and $200 000 for a transplant, impoverished donors from countries such as Brazil, India and Moldava received as little as $1 000 dollars for a kidney, the report said.

Police in early 2004 broke up an international ring that arranged for Israelis to receive kidneys from poor Brazilians at a clinic in Durban, South Africa, the report said.

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This article posted October 8, 2005.