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tv   Close up  Deutsche Welle  July 21, 2020 10:30am-11:01am CEST

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i sent orders for. students on the pests don't stay there. training successful. talking to me starts july 27th t w. there is a global shortage of organ donors the illicit trade in human kidneys and heart is booming it's a lucrative business but it doesn't only save lives it also claims that i mean the fact that your life is in danger and you need a heart doesn't give any allowance to us physician to going to somebody else for the cost. i pay money and they want to live
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this is my last chance. how can we solve this problem do we need new laws or artificial organs the only alternative. florence gomez is young and might look healthy but she faces big physical challenges a genetic disorder means that her kidneys barely function the 23 year old is only able to work part time. tension filled anguish saying i'm a lot more restricted when it comes to certain things. and i have to learn not to allow myself to be defined by this thing on this is after the thing i have to just carry on as most of us light up my.
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dialysis is her only chance of survival at the moment she has to go to hospital and this was count enough to 3 times a week each dialysis session lasts and least 4 hours. her mother and her brother are unable to donate one of their kidneys to her because they have the same genetic disorder. our kidneys filter toxins and waste out of the body and maintain our fluid balance florence gomez's body is unable to perform these functions. during dialysis a machine cleaned her blood and removes abscess fluid florence doesn't want to be filmed during the treatment. this kid more talk cried targum now when i go on monday wednesday and friday afternoon then there's a long gap over the weekend off and during this period i have to really watch what i eat and drink to parried from sunday evening to monday is always terrible is how
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. i have the most fluid in my body at this point side. and the most toxins in my body it's a disease that. florence's life is full of restrictions especially when it comes to what she eats and drinks she is only allowed to consume at most a leader of water each day and her diet has to be low in salt potassium and phosphorus the most severe form as of them because if i eat too much of those things that my heart starts to race and my muscles cramp are going it's very unpleasant heads i get on with mia and that can get very dangerous and it can also even develop into a heart attack if it's not treated in time by 30. florence gomez has been on a waiting list for a donor organ for 3 years now since then she hasn't been able to travel if an organ becomes available she has to be ready to go to the hospital almost immediately
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staff have to be able to contact her 24 seventh's she dreams of one day leading a normal life they smashed anything nice i don't want to have to wait for another 3 is that i have already waited 3 years. this is the result so many things i want to do and i've put all of them on hold. i like to travel the world to many other things. i'd like things to start moving forward. it's getting. in switzerland germany and austria there are some 15000 people waiting for a donor organ just like florence and in spain and italy the waiting lists are shorter these countries have an opt out system anyone who doesn't register their opposition is a potential donor and there are other factors that can affect the number of organs available in different nations. far more people die in traffic accidents in
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countries where seatbelts are not mandatory and where cars on top of the same standards that's one reason when of course another significant factor is the high or even very high standard of preventative health care in germany france and switzerland where blood pressure is monitored and regulated if you have people die of complications such as a brain hemorrhage as a result and fewer people are therefore eligible to become organ donors acquire if it's. something that is in fact positive has a negative impact on the number of organs available for transplant like germany switzerland compares unfavorably with other european countries in this respect. because the stuff we are concerned about the shortage of organs the food industry to people in countries like switzerland which also had very few donors 56 and 7 years ago quickly ask themselves whether there is any point of putting themselves on the waiting list here. in switzerland we have
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a lot of 2nd generation immigrants whose parents come from italy portugal or spain who wonder whether they might not be better off in those countries as the donor numbers are 3 or 4 times higher than 60 of the deficits of the donor system and that's no doubt true of germany to pick leading people to look for solutions elsewhere within europe for that also beyond its borders open the who's who and who . many people turn to organ trafficking israel is one country where this used to flourish for decades the country had the world's lowest numbers of organ donors many see organ donation as incompatible with judaism according to the old testament bodies have to be buried promptly and should not be desecrated many orthodox jews believe in the physical resurrection of the dead and therefore i think it is essential that the body should remain intact as a result each year there were a 1000 more potential recipients than actual donors. moti was critically ill
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only medication was keeping him alive he ended up in hospital for 18 months because of a virus his heart's performance was reduced to only 10 percent of what it should be his condition was deteriorating day by day to be in the 1st place and the waiting list but. every day i don't ever done that because if you do 1st at the most we can give me that it's my blood is all. people with blood group oh can only receive a heart from someone with the same blood group could be the. motive he has now been married 44 years and has grown children back then it was a race against time he knew that he would die without a transplant and he wanted to be around to see his grandchildren grow up but he
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also realized that finding a suitable donor in israel would be difficult then by chance he met someone in the hospital who had just had a heart transplant and had bought the organ abroad. take it from were not. met with come from china i see a man in those big that it tell me that now i come from china and make. china in china is china that said siri i have more office one full giant i want from colombia more places because this is big money back then israelis were among the world's leading transplant tourists maya brokers you could arrange operations in many parts of the world particularly in china eastern europe and south america morty who was $55.00 at the time opted for china a broker in tel aviv organized the all inclusive deal for him 415-0000 u.s.
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dollars he bought himself a donor heart and surgery and his health insurer was even willing to reimburse the costs this is. a broken the this man's not speak with me speak with the insurers and give all the documents they give him all the documents and they take them on need they've the are going to zap me those people that. the. you have people in china one from here or one from china and then. this will take the money from here and then me yeah you send me to china with a doctor. for it would fly would allow a doctor oxygen a big balloon and that's all. of them jack up levy is the director of the heart transplantation unit of sheba medical center in tel aviv and
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a leading cardiac surgeon when he heard about his patient morty's plans he questioned the service being provided in china me came to me one day and told me that he's care jeweled to undergo heart swells but they didn't in china and he designated the specific date of the transplant 2 weeks ahead of time and i looked at him and i told him what he did you listen to yourself how can a surgeon how can anybody promise you a heart transplant 2 weeks ahead of time you know that somebody has to die on that very day in order for you to go to god and he told me i'm not asking question that's what my insurance thought kompany told me and that's what i'm going to do. but in the absence of alternatives and with time running out moti brushed aside any moral scruples and flew to shanghai with his family there he was admitted into a renowned teaching hospital. and i go into hospital after 12
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days come the professor professor jan. and c.m. did me a little bit probably because. these oh and it's a difficult problem with find the man with their oh ok and then we will have time and after. 3 days come another time good professor and tell me maybe 2 moral 2 o'clock. nurse in a coma for a and. my family by and go. hard on demand that's possible in china received a donor organ with blood group oh he was told it had come from a 23 year old man of roughly the same height and build who had been killed in
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a road traffic accident. in china $4000.00 transplants are carried out each year more than in any other country. western transplant specialists regularly get invited to china to watch demonstrations of chinese expertise fronts him or a heart surgeon at the time got a surprising offer. of anything in response to my interest they said i could watch a heart transplant in the morning all the afternoon and this troubled me because of course an organ donation is a very seldom event we can never plan heart transplants and so that was the 1st thing that really took me aback and i asked myself how can a planet like that and how can that be possible that you got. the fact is the only way that a heart transplant can be scheduled is when the death of the donor can also be
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pre-arranged since $984984.00 they cheney's have developed a huge industry of all in the nation based on organs from executed prisoners over the years it came out that not only formally executed music business where the source of organs in china but mainly prisoners of conscience among the following one petitioners among the boers among the tibetans amount of the new christians who were designated by the communist party as enemies of the party and they were concentrated in concentration camps that certainly the term concentration camps and the way they were have been executed by killing them and sending their organs to transplant tours not only from israel israel was only a small part from all over the world starting for the united states many european countries in eastern asia $110000.00 the faces come each year until
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today and yet their whole lives in china. escaped prisoners and even doctors have made such allegations beijing denies the practice into this is nothing and this is not my problem i pay money and i want to leave this is my last chance but in the earth interest in being that in. moti didn't ask any questions about where his heart had really come from nor did the doctors in shanghai who perform the surgery those kinds of questions are frowned upon in china org and tourism is a big moneymaker there's absolutely no ethical way to justify the killing of one human being in order to save the life of another human being i mean the fact that you your life is in danger and you need a heart that doesn't give any allowance to us physician to go and kill somebody else. this is because it is one of the missions of the medical community in the
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world in order to stop that because this is a crime against humanity which by. the a couple of the has fought to change israeli law to stop organ tourism and forced organ harvesting health insurance companies no longer reimburse the costs for transplants performed abroad new legislation gives people who register as organ donors preferential treatment if they subsequently needed donor organ this is led to a 20 percent jump in organ donations. and one of the clauses of the ogun flows from floor is a unique clause again there's no such precedent in the world giving priority in all than a location to any candidate of organs as but they shouldn't who has been registered as an organ donor at least 3 years before he became a candidate. moti is happy to be healthy again and back at work at his store in the tennis club he's grateful to the chinese for saving his life even if they
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sacrificed another person's life to make it happen. it's mostly poor people from emerging countries who sell their non vital organs to people from affluent countries the world health organization estimates that 10000 illegal transplants are performed annually generating more than 1000000000 euros often at the donor's expense. it's because i know of an example from pakistan people who want to donate their kidney in return for payment have to stay in a hospital room until the recipient finally arrives. the donors have to pay for their board and lodging themselves but that's just imagine that and when the transplant is actually performed and they have had their kidney removed there may receive a very small sum for the organs and then these costs the sub tracked it from that these people are then sent home without any kind of medical care and of course these living donors are at risk of getting an infection or developing complications
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that are so severe that these patients die and can. 70000 people in europe are waiting for a donor kidney every day 12 of them die iran is the only country in the world where the organ trade is legal could we ever imagine that in europe economist briar believes it could help curb organ trafficking and tourism down young because there are a shortage of kidneys and there are not enough organs donated after death i could imagine health insurance companies buying kidneys in land but domestically and not abroad a lot of the victims we shouldn't exploited people from developing countries. get payment could be offered to residents prepared to voluntarily donate a kidney. to lassen. a kidney transplant costs 18000 euros while 10 years of dialysis costs 400000
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euro. of course you also have to count the costs of the transplant but yet even if you generously factor in aftercare at 12000 euros a year that still leaves a saving of 200000 euros for the health insurers if the donor got half of that it would be a win win situation for ther form. would the introduction of an opt out system increase the number of organs donated if everyone were considered a potential donor unless they made a statement to the contrary. experts say this would only help in part frequently smaller hospitals are not equipped to perform transplants or even identify potential donors and then there is the question of the potential costs if. for a long time it was the case that if a hospital wasn't a transponder and just happened to have a patient who had been declared brain dead that it would actually make
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a loss removing a donor organ performed as the situation has been improved in germany with the reform and the transplantation law but nevertheless the efforts involved in removing a donor organ to disturb the hospital's daily routine calling all strut. the demand for donor organs continues to outstrip the supply even despite changes in the law german scientists are among those looking for alternatives to conventional organ donation. could pigs be the solution to the shortfall in human donor organs. the university of munich is breeding animals that might be used as potential donors in the future. try and its interest rates are relatively similar to humans anatomically and physiologically and you can read papers efficiently the gestation period of us hours just 3 months 3 weeks and 3
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days that's $114.00 days in total and the young animals are ready to breed at 6 months we feel they have a lot of piglets between 8 and sometimes 14th so you could actually produce a sufficient number of picks to act as organ donors for humans. crossed species transplantation is called xenotransplantation if pictish human transplants were to work then they could provide an almost endless supply of organs but there are still many hurdles to overcome. side on from since the beginning of the 2000 so we have been able to genetically modify pigs in a very targeted manner that we can and inactivate certain problematic big genes and all modify them to include human genes and thereby reduce all completely overcome the risk of rejection. grow very quickly they weigh around a kilo at birth and can reach
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a weight of almost $100.00 kilos within 6 months he will come on board and their inner organs obviously grow at the same pace this be toyed with for the pre-clinical experiments involving transplants from pigs to baboons in particular that means that the organs quickly become too big in addition to the other genetic modifications needed for those any transplantation we have knocked out of pig gene responsible for growth regulation these pigs only reach half the body weight of normal day ox and their organs are correspondingly small. although pigs are relatively similar to humans genetically only the organs of genetically modified pigs would be suitable for animal to human transplants then blood from mention if the blood of humans all primates were to flow through the blood vessels of pigs then rejection processes take place this problem can be overcome with genetic modification there are also problems with coagulation that
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after a few weeks a small block of cancer were observed in the comparison of the smaller blood vessels that coursed organ failure. and so we generated papers that express human anticoagulants in their blood vessels were the root. and when we use those kinds of pigs there is no class. even if it's a book you know. in december 28th scene the munich heart surgeon bono high shot transplanted a pig's heart into a bedroom it survived for 6 months scientists around the world hailed the development as a trailblazing success and yet it will take at least another 5 to 10 years before a human might get a pig's heart but is it ethically acceptable to breed animals in order to harvest their organs. if this is animal experiments are needed in general most you have to be able to ethically justify whether the expected benefit for people given their
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improved quality of life of the justifies the pain and suffering or hurt of the animals if they are animals don't have any kind of pain suffering or if the genetic modifications don't influence the animals at all if we were able to save a life by transplanting a pig organ and then it would be ethically justified if it. had come. from. the booze. drugs. really. into. the mouse could help revolutionize transplant procedures. the reader will be here. by or can recall my thoughts that we can make
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a pact that there's nontransparent biological tissues transparent that our losses to use lasers turning mark ross cops. and look to the intact organs because they're like a glass now the light can go true in the shows us ever the cells and cells and details inside this literally the core of the technology reed we have been developing so far. neurobiologist only after ames to produce 3 d. printed organs researchers in munich have developed chemical processes that allow them to see inside cells and tissues and then create maps that could serve as bio printing templates to create functional organs artificially. a laser scanner registers every miniscule detail. here is the muscles in red organ son vite and nerves are in green
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a fire of muscles using out the nerves through the bones now i remove the bones you have this arm now i really pure neuron are connected to you off the most body so let's look at the treaty so again we will remove the layers muscles that way and then the bones now you can see for the 1st time all the details of the nursery something coming from top you can tell this one are strong connection in their connection all these details at the muscles how the muscles are being controlled is the vascular are details of again the most brain i will show you. here we use deploring. to cause trouble all these details and you can see all the wasco are details at the micro coupler literally said this is the the assholes in the brain such a complicated network we didn't know before so you can imagine such
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a network we generate for a human organ like a kidney you need this information. this detailed information about blood vessels nerve pathways and millions of cells should help to create artificial organs in the future that requires billions of pieces of data to be fed into computers on the basis of this data ai based algorithms work out the 3 d. print job the printer then creates the structure of the organ using bio ink. this consists of cultured cells and a kind of clue 1st of all the biological scaffold of the organ is printed and then filled with stem cells millions of cells have to be cultured for this process. that means we how to actually make such a printing machine we have to construct it so that for us the challenge additional challenges will be err on the cells what kind of cells to use because there are
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hundreds of different types of cells you have to understand what will be minimal in that that's another challenge. a 3rd challenge will be to generate really large amount of cells to print because this printers we'll use billions they want trillions of cells. to find out whether the 3 d. printed organs really work researchers will 1st have to test them out on animals. if these experiments are successful they will launch clinical human trials. so when might the 1st human get a 3 d. printed kidney. maybe we will come to a point that 3 d. printers can generate the 1st organs maybe initially do more simpler ones hearts let's call it simpler compared to kidney or liver or maybe we're also working on pancreas for example for people who are having the debit digs that's another target
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for us at the moment. i expect in 10 to 15 years that say we might really have the 1st pro prototypes coming. corns gomez can't wait that long. at the moment she is number 40 on a waiting list of 1500 patients but she refuses to give up hope. mission matched that thing and i desperately need a kidney a new kidney for you and our football i am really looking forward to it this coming week i can't imagine that i went at what. i do want to an action it got as far as the.
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inside the real saudi arabia. a young journalist from london undertakes a boat. looking for her roots she travels to a country where progress traditions often in conflict i often don't get why i have to meet. 50 sponte w. what secrets lie behind this one. discover new adventures in 360 degree. and explore fascinating world heritage sites cool w. world heritage 316 get kidnapped now.
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more. this is news live from berlin jerkin union leaders strike a hard fought deal on a multi-billion euro coronavirus recovery package they agree on the details of loans and grants to be given to countries to get hardest by the pandemic the deal which was reached after marathon talks in brussels over 4 days and nights will also involve the european commission's borrowing for the 1st time. also coming up a man goes on trial in germany for attacking a synagogue the suspects attempt failed.

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