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Journal retracts organ study over executed Chinese prisoners concerns

ChinaOrgansThe journal Liver International will retract a 2016 study because of concerns that its data on the safety of liver transplantation involved organs sourced from executed prisoners in China. The study's lead author of the study will face a life-long embargo from submitting work to the journal.

Science Mag
reports that the action, taken despite a denial by the study’s authors that such organs were used, comes after clinical ethicist Wendy Rogers of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, and colleagues authored a letter to the editor of Liver International, calling for the paper’s retraction in the “absence of credible evidence of ethical sourcing of organs.”

For years, Chinese officials have come under fire for allegedly allowing the use of organs from executed prisoners for transplants, including for foreigners coming to the country for so-called medical tourism. In January 2015, it explicitly banned the practice and set up a volunteer donation system, but doubts persist that much has changed.

The disputed study analysed 563 consecutive liver transplantations performed before the ban (from April 2010 to October 2014) at a medical centre in China. Suspicious, Rogers organised the protest letter to the journal. “Publication of data from prisoners is ethically inappropriate given that it (is) not possible to ensure that the prisoners freely agreed either to donate their organs, or to be included (in) a research programme,” she is quoted in the report as saying.

Mario Mondelli of the University of Pavia in Italy, Liver International’s editor-in-chief, notes that two of the study’s authors tried to reassure him. Shusen Zheng and Sheng Yan of the First Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, wrote that “all organs were recovered from donors after cardiac death and no grafts obtained from executed prisoners were used.”

After getting no reply to subsequent request for further evidence on the origin of the organs, Mondelli says, the journal asked the authors’ institution for an official document, by 3 February, confirming that organs were not sourced from executed prisoners. Again, he says, there was no response.

Mondelli says the original study and its related correspondence will be published together in an upcoming print issue. The study will, however, be accompanied with a retraction statement, and the authors, adds Mondelli, will face a “life-long embargo” from submitting their work to Liver International.

The report says last year, Rogers and colleagues called for the retraction of another paper in the Journal of Medical Ethics that, according to Rogers, presented a “very positive” and “sanitised” account of organ procurement in China. In that case, instead of retracting the article, the journal published a lengthy correction.

The report says the new dispute has flared just before a summit on organ trafficking and transplant tourism.

[link url="http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/02/study-retraction-reignites-concern-over-china-s-possible-use-prisoner-organs"]Science Mag report[/link]
[link url="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/liv.13348/full"]Liver International article[/link]
[link url="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27589369"]Study[/link]

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