Dutch hospitals to drop U.S. body brokers, cite ethical concerns
reuters.com
reuters.com
Do you think they can give privacy?
Government and military cannot be outsourced overseas.
A lot of countries buy arms from the US. In fact I might even hazard to guess that the US is the world's largest arms supplier. Perhaps you are right, maybe the missiles will not work if fired in the wrong direction.
Dont know anything about missiles, but jets wont work. At least not the Eurofighter for some reason.
Apparently an NSA contractor has to type in a key before every start.
>Damit die 15 Eurofighter auch wirklich starten dürfen, zahlte Österreichs Bundesheer in drei Jahren 1,5 Millionen Euro an eine private US-Sicherheitsfirma: Jetzt wurden die Kosten für jene am Fliegerhorst Zeltweg stationierten zwei "Zivilisten" bestätigt, die jedes Aufsteigen eines Jets mit einem aktuellen US-"Crypto-Schlüssel" für die Navigation und die Freund-Feind-Erkennung zulassen müssen.
>In order for the 15 Eurofighters to start, Austria's federal army paid 1.5 million euros over three years to a private US security company. Now, the costs for those two "civilians" stationed at the Zeltweg air base have been confirmed, who have to allow every start with current US-"Crypto-Keys" for navigation and friend or foe identification.
The ministry of defense denies that the two Americans from a not named US company are NSA contractors. They claim the jets would fly without but without encrypted navigation and communication. He also mentions the same situation for Sweden and Switzerland.
[1] https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/binaries/rijksoverheid/document...
Poor people shouldn't have to resort to selling their body.
Semantics aside, the real problem is the (desperation of) poverty, not the results of it.
I suspect this is an adaptation to both increase hemoglobin transport, but also to reduce cancer risks.
In that context, anybody who works hard labor is trading in part of their health for income because many labor-intensive jobs will take their toll on the body [0]. Up to a point where people either have to switch line of work or go into early retirement, as certain parts of their body stop functioning properly and they are stuck with chronic pains for the remainder of their lives.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-work-occupational-...
The human body is amazingly reliable, no comparison to "dead" (non-self-sustaining, non-self-renuvating) machines.
I also do not find selling your hair, your blood, your saliva or urine or your sperm or what ever your body produces as selling your body.
It does not follow that there are no ethical boundaries for departing from these "products".
This argument in particular applies in both cases.
In other words, both stem from a belief in "human dignity".
There isn't really anything special about sex work, societal views on it aside. It's hard work, but for many people it causes no more harm to their dignity than anything else they could be doing.
Source: sex worker friends.
Though the most interesting organ-based financial instruments would be rights to harvest organs post mortem, which several people in this thread seem to be overlooking.
And no matter how intellectually satisfying it would be if it were true, I don't think Western culture (or psychology in general) agrees with you that sex is just another service like computer repair. We don't have special categories of crimes for forced computer repair at gunpoint for instance. And we don't shame and fire overbearing bosses for pressuring employees into illicit computer repair.
No, but only because the European countries which prohibit compensation for tissue donations solve their shortages by importing tissue from the US.
This part of the argument does not apply to the case of selling your body after death. Making it illegal to sell one's body after death seems more logical to me then.
And has been pointed out by you and others, one can theoretically sell the rights to one's body parts after death, assuming the contract is enforced.
The 35 year old dying in a car accident probably has a lot of people depending on them that could use the money.
It could be a “free” life insurance policy.
If blood instead was paid for people would be incentivized to lie, people desperate for cash wouldn't care about the consequences. For example junkies who might have all sorts of shit in their system.
Getting enough plasma or various immunoglobulins can be the difficult part.
And sometimes you heavily depend on a few outlier cases, like this guy that’s estimated to have saved 2.4million through his 1000 donations:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Harrison_(blood_donor)
Many of the screening questions just reduce waste in the face of plenty of willing donors.
As a result, other countries with volunteer donation systems aren’t self-sufficient for plasma.
Instead they usually rely on US imports. To the point of blood products accounting for 1.3% of all US exports.
I think it's complicated. Poor people shouldn't need to "resort" to anything. We should have safety nets for people who are poor. But given that we don't have those safety nets, we should be at least a little cautious about removing mechanisms for them to help themselves, even if those mechanisms have potentially harmful elements.
I don't know what the current underground/black-market situation looks like for selling blood, but I don't take it as a given that a regulated market would be worse than what we have. I would need to see data that supported that conclusion before I jumped to it.
Poor people can sell their labor. Poor people can sell sex in the Netherlands. Why shouldn't they be able to sell other fluids?
Have you done some coke last month? Just tell and nothing will happen, except you won't be donating any blood for the next 11 months. Have you done some coke last month, but also really need money to feed your kids? It might be really tempting to lie and get that blood bank money anyway.
I would much rather rely on testing donated blood than taking someone's word for it, no matter how much money they were or weren't paid.
It's a strange omission as all the other resources (vivaria, lab equipment, chemicals, APIs etc are easily purchasable).
> From 2012 to 2016, according to manifest records reviewed by Reuters, MedCure shipped body parts valued at a total of more than $500,000 from the United States to the Netherlands. MedCure said it helps connect donors and scientific, research and medical entities. "We are an accredited and regulated institution and adhere to the best-in-class industry standards for safety ethics, and transparency," the company said in a statement to Reuters.
Followed by:
> Freek Dikkers, the professor of ear, nose and throat medicine at the AMC whose department bought the heads, said it was stopping after learning that the company solicits donors at hospices and old age homes and that its former owners earned millions from the trade. Dikkers said that was “unacceptable.”
Something does not add up. How can you be a champion of "transparency" while your clients ignore (or pretend to ignore?) how you source the parts?
1. Isn't it obvious whether a head is old?
2. How often are old heads removed from bodies without illness?
3. Dikkers doesn't believe in free-market commerce under a low-tax regime. That's his choice, but that means he shouldn't buy anything from an American or multinational corporation.
Wait, what do they cremate then if they get to keep the body??
I carry a donor, and I want to be cremated as well (since I find it pathetic to use land after I passed away). If I die, I want whoever is left on Earth to benefit from my legacy. Mainly my family, but also others who are in need. I'd only be grateful if someone else would do the same for me if they'd pass away.
This is why I support the modernisation that being a donor is opt-out in 2019 instead of opt-in (in NL).
As far as I'm concerned, those who are donor get priority over those who are not donor, to avoid leeches (akin to people who don't vaccinate who benefit from those who do).
Those who save you are unable to know beforehand to whom your body parts are going to get used to. Doctors don't even know this beforehand either. Perhaps if you got very rare characteristics.
I've had to make the decision in the past to give my father, who was already very ill, one of my kidneys. That's a very difficult and emotional decision to make...
[1] I used to be not a registered donor because I didn't want anyone except my nearest family members to know about this. However, knowing about it right after death because it is in your wallet or registered on the internet can save lives.
It does not matter if doctors know who would use your body parts. They even may be idealistic - you may help to save multiple lives. So they will make a decision, even perhaps subconscious, between your life and those potential saved lives.
There is a nice scene at the beginning of Dr Strange movie about this.
There should be some checks and balances so that the doctors will not become butchers. Perhaps the need to get an agreement of a close relative.
You aen't using it up. You, or your heirs, etc., just rent the plot for a while. Where I live every resident is entitled to a plot in the local churchyard for twenty years, if you, or your family, want more then you pay a fee for more years. The town has been in existence for at least two hundred years yet the size of the graveyard increases only as the population increases. My wife's ashes were buried there last year and there is room on the gravestone for my name and that of my children if they want it so it could be occupied for another hundred years. However, it is more likely that twenty years after my death the plot will be reused by another family.
This occupies about one square metre. The house I live in occupies about 900 square metres of land so I don't think my wife's ashes are occupying a disproportionate amount of space.
Don't take this as criticism, just another point of view.
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/04/17/603360426/how-...
Occam's razor explanation for this would be the harvesting of a little extra profit, by defrauding the customs tax system.
Is this what peak capitalism looks like?
Does money have more value than humans, life, kids, health, freedom? If yes, them yes.
Oops, we're already there.
They get their “merchandise” for free from the last goodwill of people. If not, apparently they’ll offer free cremation to families to convince them to agree to donating the organs— since they have to dispose of the corpse anyway this is probably just an expense they’d have to pay regardless.
And then they sell this donation for profit. This is baffling.
Um, no? If they aren't given custody of the body, they don't have to dispose of the corpse. The family would have to do that.
Another example of this would be clothing donations. Most people donate clothing with the expectation that it will be given to the needy for free. When in reality, these second-hand clothes will usually be sold to traders who then retail them in developing countries [0], undercutting the domestic competition who can't compete with the massive influx of "free" clothing.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/sustainable...
https://slate.com/human-interest/2009/07/the-arrests-of-rabb...
"three New Jersey mayors, two state assemblymen and five rabbis were among more than 40 people arrested in New Jersey"
Mayor Peter J. Cammarano III of Hoboken, Mayor Dennis Elwell of Secaucus, both Democrats; Assemblyman L. Harvey Smith of Jersey City, also a Democrat; and Assemblyman Daniel M. Van Pelt, a Republican from Ocean County.