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Iranians sell kidneys on Instagram to survive economic hardship
- ryzvonusef 3y ago> Iran is the only country in the world where selling a kidney in legal. > Since the 1980s, the government has offered a fixed payment of 10 million rials (about $236) and subsidised health insurance to donors it matches with a person in need of a transplant, but many people head to the black market to bid for a better price. > On a well-known street near Tehran's Valiasr Square, walls are littered with signs advertising organs for sale, with sellers listing their blood type, age and phone number next to listings for livers, kidneys and corneas. > Keyhan, 39, said he “can’t count” how many people have contacted him to buy his kidney, which he has advertised on Twitter, Instagram and Telegram, where some organ-selling channels have tens of thousands of subscribers.
- seertaak 3y agoThat's difficult to read. I can only imagine how desperate BOTH sellers and buyers must be.
- psychphysic 3y agoVery good point, up until know I hadn't considered the buyer. In my mental model they just collected kidneys. But if course this is a huge spend because they too need this transaction. Part of me wonders the quality of the match, and surgery. I imagine the middle men make all the money
- thatguy0900 3y ago239$ sounds insanely low
- dumdumchan 3y agoThat's twice the average yearly salary. Still pretty low though.
- milani 3y agoI don't think this is true. https://www.averagesalarysurvey.com/iran https://www.averagesalarysurvey.com/iran
- boeingUH60 3y agoThese SEO-optimized salary websites are a joke, and usually never cite sources for their figures. An average annual salary of $17,600 makes Iran a relatively rich country...in reality, it's much lower than that. With crippling sanctions and extreme inflation, it should be somewhere between $100 and $500 monthly.
- miadabdi 3y agoWhat is this? I am living in Iran and avg salary a month is 15 million tomans which is around 330 usd a month.
- paxys 3y agoUmm..no it is not. Minimum wage in Iran is ~$7500 USD/yr and average in the bigger cities is a lot higher than that.
- miadabdi 3y agoI am Iranian, working as a software developer full time, I'm getting paid around 250 usd a month. It's a shit show here. I'm trying to buy a car and I should be paying about 20 month of my salary for this (shit)[https://dl.bahalmag.ir/images/%D8%B9%DA%A9%D8%B3_%D9%BE%D8%B1%D8%A7%DB%8C%D8%AF_%D8%B5%D8%A8%D8%A7_%D8%B5%D9%81%D8%B1/%D8%B9%DA%A9%D8%B3-%D9%BE%D8%B1%D8%A7%DB%8C%D8%AF-%D8%B5%D8%A8%D8%A7-%D8%B5%D9%81%D8%B1.jpg https://dl.bahalmag.ir/images/%D8%B9%DA%A9%D8%B3_%D9%BE%D8%B...]
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- farhadhf 3y agoThe exchange rate used to get to the $236 amount is the "official" exchange rate stated by the government which even the government itself doesn't use. 10 million rials is $20.28 based on the real exchange rate used by literally everyone inside the country (see bonbast.com for the real rates - also, as an aside, "bonbast" means deadend in Farsi, which aptly describes the current economical situation in Iran). For context, the minimum wage is $152 per month (around 75,182,000 rials). The economy has gone to shit in the past 10 years. The minimum wage was around $425/month, or $2.4/hour back then, compared to $0.86/hour now. The Rail has lost much of its value since then but the salaries haven't increased enough to cover the brutal inflation, resulting in extreme poverty for the majority of the population and situations like the one explained in the article.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- xwdv 3y agoWonder if there is a startup opportunity in being some kind of organ broker.
- dekken_ 3y agoyeah it might look a little something like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ppw5yTa3uk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ppw5yTa3uk
- thatguy0900 3y agoThis is exactly what I thought of
- CodeWriter23 3y agoWe should definitely seek rent from these desperate people.
- DoctorOW 3y agoThis is the most capitalist thing I've ever seen.
- ftyers 3y agoJames Mickens came up with tooth.ie, where poor people rich in teeth can donate for a market-determined price to rich people poor in teeth.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- cumshitpiss 3y ago(YC S24) lifeline - we're disrupting the grassroots medical industry by connecting donaters and buyers directly
- getmeinrn 3y agoThe only startup opportunity you should be thinking about is how to reduce this situation from existing in the first place.
- treeman79 3y agoThen there is the forced organ Harvesting in China. Need a new heart that’s a match. No need to wait. Politically inconvenient Donors are dying to meet demands. https://humanrightscommission.house.gov/events/hearings/forced-organ-harvesting-china-examining-evidence https://humanrightscommission.house.gov/events/hearings/forc...
- LatteLazy 3y agoNo one has ever found any actual evidence for that though. There are just people repeating each other claims as sources or citing poorly understood stats...
- michaelmcdonald 3y agoI don't know, this seems pretty convincing to me: https://humanrightscommission.house.gov/events/hearings/forced-organ-harvesting-china-examining-evidence https://humanrightscommission.house.gov/events/hearings/forc...
- LatteLazy 3y agoExactly. The best they can manage is to not conclusively disprove the inference that it might have happened... The Washington post did a piece saying it's nonsense too. The best evidence anyone can find is basically "it would be profitable". This is right up there with Pizzagate...
- seatac76 3y agoJust heartbreaking
- 0xFFOOFF 3y ago[flagged]
- renewiltord 3y agoA regulated organ trade is good. We have provenance management here in the US already and the lifetime risks for a kidney donor are dwarfed by other jobs like underwater engineering.
- 1234letshaveatw 3y agoRight- is it really more ethical to let recipients die on a waiting list?
- mooreds 3y agoIf you want a deeper dive into this, here's a podcast episode from 2015 about the Iranian kidney market: https://www.econtalk.org/tina-rosenberg-on-the-kidney-market-in-iran/ https://www.econtalk.org/tina-rosenberg-on-the-kidney-market...
- diimdeep 3y agoWhat is up with journalists including this one[1] publishing only negative sentiment news stories ? If we could make The "Sentiment Meter" that measures the sentiment neutrality of news publications based on past journalist publications, they would sink in this rating. [1] https://www.thenationalnews.com/topics/Author/holly-johnston/ https://www.thenationalnews.com/topics/Author/holly-johnston...
- MattRix 3y agoWhy should sentiment be neutral, especially from a single journalist? It seems absurd to assume that there must be an equal amount of positive and negative things to cover.
- tehwebguy 3y agoYeah, they should write an article about all the other countries were people don’t sell their kidneys!
- NikolaNovak 3y agoIf you are e.g. A war correspondent and that's your job, you're probably going to have mostly negative sentiment stories. Similarly If you focus on reporting child abuse topics, similar. If your shtick is to embed yourself in poverty areas and bring true stories, it won't be lolipops and rainbows. Outside of journalism, same thing. There are jobs where you get exposed to wonderful things day in and day out, and there are jobs where you get exposed to bad sad stuff. and everything in between. Particularly if your goal to be in journalism in the first place may be to change / improve the world, you might focus on things that need changing / improving. Finally, outside of some very specific places, in a lot of the world things suck more than they don't. I don't know if that answers your question or you had a different question / point to make?
- hashstring 3y agoNauseating news… heartbreaking indeed.
- oh_sigh 3y agoAre Iranians in especial need of kidneys for some reason compared to, say, Americans? Or do other countries have a more functioning donor network? Better results managing treatment with damaged kidneys/more readily available dialysis?
- coderintherye 3y agoStart from understanding that the list of people waiting on kidney donations in the United States is long, and the average wait time is 3-5 years. Some awaiting kidneys will die before getting a donated one. If selling kidneys were legal in the United States then people would be buying and selling them here.
- gre 3y ago...economic hardship partially caused by economic sanctions. Sanctions are literally war and illegal unless approved by the UN. Sanctions on Iran: https://www.state.gov/iran-sanctions/ https://www.state.gov/iran-sanctions/ Ben Norton on the Iran sanctions: https://youtu.be/dN2oeSXHVMI?t=1343 https://youtu.be/dN2oeSXHVMI?t=1343
- esafak 3y agoDo sanctions like this work? I imagine it would only serve to unite the people against the sanctioner. edit: I realize from the responses that I assumed the goal was to cause the sanctioned government to fall. Of course there may be other goals.
- KptMarchewa 3y agoThey do. They make the enemy nation poorer, in contrast to economic cooperation that makes them stronger - which US just started to see in China.
- RobotToaster 3y agoGiven examples like Cuba and the DPRK, it certainly doesn't seem to work.
- gre 3y agoSanctions in general work very well and many people see them as war. https://www.amazon.com/Sanctions-War-Anti-Imperialist-Perspectives-Geo-Economic/dp/1642598127 https://www.amazon.com/Sanctions-War-Anti-Imperialist-Perspe...
- CamperBob2 3y agoWithout making me read a whole book to find the answer, what are some examples of cases where sanctions have worked? It seems that sanctions are primarily useful at driving the target country into the arms of a larger adversarial state. And as a near-absolute rule, they never affect the leadership responsible for the behavior being sanctioned; only the common people suffer. My impression is that economic sanctions amount to collective punishment, and are thus unethical. I still hold out hope that they will prove effective against certain egregious actors such as the Russian government, but I think it's fair to demand continuous oversight and adjustment to ensure the sanctions are having the intended effect, and not just causing needless suffering among people who are powerless to effect change.
- xyzzy123 3y agoOK yup, lol lets see if this is true, who is selling?
- getmeinrn 3y agoThis is one of those really horrible situations that you want to ban because the knowledge of its existence is too depressing to grasp. But if you ban it, you haven't solved the poverty issue, in fact you've made people even more desperate. It becomes even more dangerous, higher prices due to lower supply. But the opposite isn't desirable either. Sure, you can make it more legal, but now these people are being systematically exploited for their organs and there would be very little reason for it to go away, meaning there would now be incentives to keep people brutally poor so that you can get their organs. What if you made a social program that said "if you are desperate enough to sell your organs, come to us and we will give you resources so you don't need to (Conditions apply)." And in order to curb abuse, some small percentage of the applicants actually were required to donate an organ, so that the program wasn't exploited by people stealing resources from those very desperate people. If you take resources from this program, you risk actually selling an organ like you otherwise intended. Only truly desperate people would be brave enough to use the program. And if you think that compelled donation is also barbaric, even in a small percentage, it would actually be a lie, but one that some portion of the program's budget is dedicated to upholding.
- paxys 3y agoTL;DR - what you really need to fix is poverty. Second (and third and fourth...) order effects will then automatically fix themselves.
- getmeinrn 3y agoYes - fix poverty, no - higher order effects will fix themselves. Think about how many billions of COVID relief funds were stolen due to governments being terrible or corrupt at administration. There has to be some (perceived) risk to taking common resources. And that risk needs to be calibrated so that it does not phase truly desperate people, but discourages exploitative people to move on to easier targets. Imagine if by taking COVID relief funds, you signed a contract that could destroy your business and made everyone in your organization personally criminally liable, if the funds were taken fraudulently.
- machina_ex_deus 3y ago
- psychphysic 3y agoYay the sanctions are working! Soon there will be no urinating in Iran. What's that? It was supposed to stop uranium ... Good god what have we done?
- weatherlite 3y agoUranium, urinating, kidneys.. I see what you did there...
- m3kw9 3y agoTells a lot on how lucky some have it with better government support systems
- 2-718-281-828 3y agowouldn't be surprised if kidney donor is going to be a job some day. a rich person pays a salary to a compatible potential donor and expects you to live healthy, workout, no alcohol etc. and ... if necessary part ways with one of your kidneys.
- ryzvonusef 3y agoI am from Pakistan, were organ selling is technically illegal. And yet, it happens, poor bonded labourers end up with generational debt and sell their kidneys to try to recoup. https://www.dawn.com/news/1737067/organ-racket https://www.dawn.com/news/1737067/organ-racket