'Dan Rather Reports' Investigates Black Market Organ Trafficking

DALLAS, Jan. 11 /PRNewswire/ -- This Tuesday's Dan Rather Reports gives you a shocking, previously unseen look into the black market for human kidneys and how shadowy criminal organizations are exploiting some of the world's most desperate people as they expand their morbid trade.

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Waiting lists for kidneys from deceased donors have gotten so long that organized criminals have made good money trafficking the vital organ. We'll show you how sophisticated these "kidney mafias" have become, employing kidney "brokers" to troll dialysis centers for patients willing to drop close to $200,000 for a transplant; and networks of "kidney hunters" who recruit, coerce and sometimes force people in some of the world's poorest countries to give up a kidney - often for less than $3,000.

Most people had never heard of this black market until last summer's arrest of a Brooklyn man charged with trafficking in kidneys - the first case of its kind in the U.S.

But renowned University of California, Berkeley anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes has been chasing kidney traffickers for more than a decade - and she brought us along on this hunt, spanning three continents, to some of the world's hot spots for organ trafficking: a poor village in Moldova, where more than a dozen young men had sold their kidneys; the streets of Istanbul, Turkey, where she tried to track down the whereabouts of a rogue surgeon known as "Dr. Vulture;" and to Israel, where we filmed a violent confrontation between one alleged broker and a family member of a recipient recovering from a botched, black market transplant.

Dan Rather Reports - "Kidney Pirates" premieres on HDNet, Tuesday, January 12 at 8:00 p.m. ET with an encore at 11:00 p.m. ET.

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