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30 May 1996
The Baby Parts Myth, The Anatomy of a Rumor
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United States Information Agency
May 1996
THE "BABY PARTS" MYTH: THE ANATOMY OF A RUMOR
Since 1987, a totally unfounded, horrifying rumor has swept the world press. The ghastly and totally untrue charge is that Americans -- or Europeans, Canadians, or Israelis -- are adopting infants or kidnapping children from Latin America or other locations, and murdering or maiming them in order to use their body parts for organ or cornea transplants. This gruesome story has been reported hundreds of times by newspapers, radio, and television stations throughout the world, has won prestigious journalism awards, and is believed by tens of millions of people, if not more.
The rumor turned deadly in Guatemala in 1994. On March 29, 1994, an American tourist, June Weinstock, was attacked by a mob who accused her of abducting a Guatemalan boy. Weinstock suffered multiple broken arms, internal injuries, and severe head injuries that have left her permanently incapacitated.
The Mythical Origins of the Rumor
The "baby parts" rumor probably arose spontaneously as an "urban legend," a false but widely believed form of modern folklore. There are many such widely repeated but totally unsubstantiated stories. For example, when microwave ovens began to be widely used, an apocryphal story began to circulate about a person who had tried to dry their wet dog in a microwave oven, only to have it explode. These word-of-mouth stories are typically said to have happened to "a friend of a friend," who can never be located because there is no factual basis for the rumor.
In the same way that fears about microwave technology led to this unfounded rumor, recent dramatic advances in organ transplantation have contributed to the "baby parts" myth. All of us may someday benefit from the gift of life that organ transplantation can provide. But the process also stirs powerful, primal anxieties. This was illustrated by the fictional 1978 American movie Coma, in which patients at a hospital were placed into comas so that corrupt doctors could "harvest" their organs for profit. The same fear of wrongful death and mutilation that formed the basis for this fictional thriller is at the root of the "baby parts" rumor.
Experts on popular myths state that the "baby parts" story is a modern adaptation of a centuries-old tale. French folklorist Veronique Campion-Vincent has written:
The baby-parts story is a new -- updated and technologized -- version of an immemorial fable. The core of the fable is that a group's children are being kidnapped and murdered by evil outsiders.
Accusations of such kidnappings and ritual murder were made against Christians in ancient Rome [and against] Jews throughout antiquity, the Middle Ages, and up to modern times .... Child abductions in 18th century France were explained by ailing nobility who needed them for medical reasons: the leprous King needed blood baths, or a mutilated Prince needed a new arm which incompetent surgeons were trying each day to graft from a new kidnapped child.
The Rumor Breaks Into the World Press
In the modern version of this legend, individuals have reported hearing the "baby parts" rumor as far back as the early to mid-1980s, although it did not appear in the international press until January 1987, when Leonardo Villeda Bermudez, the former Secretary General of the Honduran Committee for Social Welfare, mentioned the rumor during an interview in a way that made it appear as if it was true. Mr. Villeda immediately issued a clarification stating that he had merely heard unconfirmed rumors of such activities. All top Honduran officials, including the President's wife, emphasized that there was no evidence for such allegations, but by this time the rumor had been reported by a wire service and it began to circulate throughout the media worldwide, appearing in Guatemala the next month and soon afterwards in Europe.
In April 1987, the Soviet disinformation apparatus began a conscious effort to spread and embellish this unfounded rumor. On April 5, 1987, Pravda carried the three-month old Honduran story, citing the original allegations without mentioning subsequent press accounts dismissing the story. The Soviet news agency TASS replayed the story, and during 1987 and 1988 it appeared many times in the Soviet media and in pro-Soviet media worldwide. The Soviet disinformation campaign in the media ended in late 1988.
Occasional disinformation -- deliberate lies or distortions undertaken for a political purpose -- still occurs. The Cubans continue to press the child organ trafficking story, having repeatedly tried to introduce resolutions on this issue at U.N. human rights meetings. One formerly Soviet-controlled front group, the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, has continued to try to foster the rumor, particularly through its status as a non-governmental organization accredited to the United Nations. Some anti-U.S. extremists, typically from the far left in Western Europe and the extreme right in Guatemala, have embraced the rumor enthusiastically, apparently because it fits with their anti-U.S. political agenda. Most recently, Iranian publications have begun to propagate the rumor.
Although political motivations have been responsible for some of the more spectacular outbursts of the child organ trafficking rumor, for the most part, the rumor has been embraced and spread by well-meaning individuals who believe it out of naivete or who worry that it may be true. Tragically, the publicity these well-intentioned individuals have given the rumor by deploring a non-existent crime has inadvertently contributed to its credibility and the resultant damage it has done. At this point, the rumor has attained such currency that it appears certain to continue on the strength of its own momentum for years to come.
The Impossibility of Concealing Clandestine Organ Transplants
Health and organ transplant officials in the United States and other countries have stated emphatically that it would be impossible to successfully conceal any clandestine organ trafficking ring.
In many countries, the sale or purchase of organs for transplants is expressly forbidden by law, with stiff penalties for violators. For example, organ sales for transplant have been illegal in the United States since 1984. There are similar statutes in many other countries.
In addition to the legal and moral deterrents to organ trafficking, the technical requirements that would be involved in arranging and operating an alleged murder-for-organ-transplantation scheme are so formidable that such clandestine activities are a practical impossibility.
In order for an organ transplantation to have any chance of success, a number of sophisticated medical procedures must be conducted to determine the suitability of various organs for transplantation and to permit a match with potential recipients. In particular, correct tissue and blood typing is critical to matching donor organs and potential transplant recipients. Crossing the blood group barrier from transplant donor to recipient can result in death. An equally important consideration is histocompatibility, which measures the extent to which a donor organ and a recipient match.
The surface of all cells in the body carries proteins known as major histocompatibility complex (MHC) antigens. These proteins act as signals that identify what is uniquely self to our immune system. The importance of matching MHC antigens for transplanted organs is similar to the need to match blood types for blood transfusions. However, MHC matches are more complex, and excessive differences between a donor and a recipient will cause the recipient's immune system to attack and reject the transplanted organ. In humans, the MHC antigens are encoded by a set of linked genes, which are designated as Human Leukocyte Antigens (HLA). In transplantation, it is vital to the survival and well-being of the recipient to identify and match the donor's HLA types. This can only be accomplished in a laboratory designed to test histocompatibility, and requires individuals with specialized laboratory skills to conduct the testing.
After the organs have been extracted from a donor, an extremely delicate and complex procedure that involves a transplant surgeon and support staff including an anesthesiologist, attending surgeons, and operating room nurses, the organs must be transported as rapidly as possible, typically by helicopter or airplane, to the hospitals where the transplants will occur. Before transporting the donor organ, special preservation solutions must be infused into it. Proper insulation and temperature controlled packaging including adequate ice or refrigeration must be used to protect the organ during shipment. Absolute sterile conditions must be maintained for the organ to remain viable for transplant.
Organ transplants must be accomplished extremely rapidly because the time that organs can survive outside the body is severely limited. Hearts must be transplanted within 5 hours, livers within 24 hours, pancreases within 6 to 12 hours, and lungs within 5 hours. Kidneys can survive the longest, but most surgeons will not transplant a kidney that was removed more than 48 hours ago.
Sophisticated surgical equipment and highly skilled medical personnel are necessary for a transplant to take place. At a minimum, one needs 20 individuals, including three members of a surgical team, one scrub nurse, one circulating nurse, one anesthesiologist, one perfusion technician, and one general function technician. For all transplant surgery, a large area needed for the operating table, instrument table, laboratory instruments, anesthesia equipment, monitoring equipment, spare supplies, gas sources, and personnel access.
In addition, in order to prepare for a kidney recipient's surgery, a kidney machine must be available to perform dialysis. For a heart transplant, the patient must be placed on circulatory and respiratory bypass equipment during the entire length of the transplant procedure and constantly monitored by a pulmonary technologist. During a liver transplant, bleeding is extensive because the liver produces the substance that causes blood to coagulate. Access to a blood bank is necessary because as many as 20 to 50 units of blood may be required for blood transfusions.
Thus, the daunting technical requirements of the transplant process make it impossible that transplants could occur clandestinely, as the child organ trafficking rumor alleges. Such highly complex operations could not occur at hidden, makeshift facilities. It would not be possible to assemble a team of highly trained medical professionals who would all be willing to engage in such morally repugnant criminal acts and be willing to take the enormous personal risks that would be involved in performing a transplant operation clandestinely. Nor would it be possible to arrange such a procedure for purely logistical reasons alone because the technical resources required could not be assembled outside of major medical centers.
In addition, the transplant process does not end with the completion of the transplant operation. Follow-up care of the transplant recipient is critical for short-term and long-term survival and well-being. After the transplant operation, the organ recipient must be treated by a transplant physician, a separate individual from the transplant surgeon, who monitors, medicates, and treats the transplant recipient for the rest of his life. No transplant physician would treat a person without knowing all the circumstances of their progressive organ disease, the details of their transplant operation, including the identity and health records of the donor of the organ, and a great deal of other information that would not be available if the transplant operation were performed clandestinely.
It is important to remember that transplant surgeons and physicians are highly trained professionals who are handsomely compensated for their expertise. There would be no reason for them to engage in clandestine, illegal transplantations. On the contrary, they would have every incentive not to participate in such activities. If such illegal activities were detected -- and they surely would be given the large number of people involved, the highly technical nature of the procedures, and the abhorrent nature of the alleged activities -- this would mean the effective end of the surgeon or physician's career, with catastrophic financial and personal implications.
In sum, organ transplantation is such an immensely complicated, highly technical, heavily regulated, extremely time-sensitive procedure, involving so many highly trained professional personnel and so much sophisticated medical equipment, that clandestine organ trafficking is, quite simply, an impossibility from a practical point of view. The charges that children are being kidnapped and murdered for such purposes make the allegations even more dubious.
Nor is there any evidence that clandestine rings exist in order to kidnap children or others in order to extract their corneas for transplant. Corneas, which are tissues, not organs, can be extracted up to 12 hours after death for use in sight-restoring transplantations. This means that if anyone wished to procure corneas illicitly, they could do so by bribing someone at a morgue to extract corneas from corpses. There is no reason for anyone to kidnap or murder children or others in order to obtain corneas.
Repeated Investigations Find No Evidence for the Rumor
In early 1987, when the "baby parts" rumor first appeared, representatives of the U.S. Justice Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service all investigated their records and stated that they had no evidence that would indicate alleged organ trafficking.
On July 23, 1987, in response to a European Parliament resolution asking for an investigation of such charges, the European Community Commission stated that it "does not know of any transplant operations performed in Europe for which the organs of Latin American children have been used."
On October 7, 1987, the Geneva-based non-governmental organization Defense for Children, International (DCI) stated, "In recent months, DCI has tried to have these reports verified by its representatives in Central America. So far, these investigations have failed to find any evidence to substantiate the reports."
On January 29, 1988, after these charges had resurfaced in Guatemala, the Director of the Treasury Police, Mr. Oscar Augusto Diaz Urquizu, stated: "The institution which I direct has no proof, evidence or indication that Guatemalan children are being sent to the United States, or to any other country, to be dismembered and used as organ donors."
In a July 11, 1988 report, U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar warned that reports of such activities issued by the International Association of Democratic Lawyers were "possibly fictitious," adding that there has been no "corroboration" for them.
On August 23, 1988, Gene Pierce, Executive Director of the United Network for Organ Sharing, stated that, "since the establishment of the Scientific Registry on October 1, 1987, UNOS has kept very detailed records on organ donors. There has been no documentation of any Latin American children under the age of 5 becoming donors in the United States."
On August 25, 1988, Linda Sheaffer, Director of the Divison of Organ Transplantation at the U.S. Public Health Service, stated that such illegal transplants would be "not only impractical but impossible." She pointed out that some organ transplants "take up to 14 hours, none of the procedures could occur without the complete cooperation and knowledge of the hospital staff," and "any such large scale operation would not be kept secret."
On September 23, 1988, the Paris-based International Federation for Human Rights released a "Mission Report" on their "Investigation on Possible Trafficking in Infant Organs." It stated, "we have not been able to find a single piece of evidence indicating that such a trafficking operation is really occurring."
On September 26, 1988, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation stated that "based on a review of all information available to the FBI, these charges are completely unfounded."
On October 3, 1988, R.C. Steiner, chief of the U.S. National Central Bureau, which represents the United States in the international criminal investigative organization Interpol, said that its records "do not reflect any requests for criminal investigative assistance from either the police in the United States or the police of any foreign country concerning this matter."
On October 8, 1988, Assistant Secretary of State Richard Schifter stated that "My government has made an exhaustive investigation of the charges and rumors related to this matter and both the U.S. Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have concluded that they are totally groundless."
On November 18, 1988, Guatemala's Diario de Centro America reported that Guatemalan president Cerezo had stated: "The Guatemalan government has made serious and thorough investigations on the trafficking of babies and it has been concluded that the rumors on the ‘butchering' of babies are false."
On June 6, 1989, Assistant Secretary for Health James Mason and Surgeon General C. Everett Koop released a lengthy letter in which they pointed out that "the technical and medical aspects of organ transplantation make it impossible to obtain and transplant organs secretly." They stated, "The requirements of the process, including numerous highly trained professional personnel and sophisticated equipment, assure that any such activity would be detected and exposed," stressing that "removals of organs is a complex surgical procedure, performed only in hospitals, and specialized technical arrangements are needed to preserve the organs." Mason and Koop went on to point out, "Organ transplant procedures are also highly complex and must be performed in the highest level surgical facilities, most often in large hospitals affiliated with schools for the education of physicians." "Because of the nature of the technology involved," they concluded, "these activities could not be conducted in secret or makeshift facilities."
On February 7, 1991, Eduardo Mestre Sarmiento, the Permanent Representative of Colombia to the United Nations in Geneva, sent a letter to Mr. Jan Martenson, U.N. Under-Secretary General, in which he stated that the office of the Attorney General of Colombia had launched an "exhaustive" investigation of charges made by the International Association of Democratic Lawyers that children's organs from Colombia were being sold. Mr. Mestre stated that the investigation had found that the claims made by IADL were "completely unsubstantiated," adding that "the newspapers referred to as having published the news item never had knowledge of these acts."
On July 20, 1992, the Mexican newspaper Epoca published the findings of its investigation of this issue. It stated:
Doctor Arturo Dib Kuri, director of the Health Secretariat's National Transplants Register, expresses this opinion: "The possibilities of human organ and tissue trafficking are extremely remote. It would be virtually impossible to conceal a criminal organization of this magnitude."
The interviewee continues: "First, to obtain an idea of what we are saying, I need only mention that, in the entire country, there would be, at the most, 10 doctors capable of performing a transplant. In an operation of this type, such as a liver transplant, 32 persons participate in an operating room, including doctors, nurses, paramedics, and team and technical personnel; not to mention laboratory workers and the personnel required for post-operative hospitalization ...."
Doctor Dib Kuri also describes the conditions for preserving an organ outside the body. The medical technique for extracting a kidney is very delicate.
"It takes from 4 to 6 hours .... Once it is outside the donor's body, it must be kept at a temperature no lower than 4 degrees centigrade, because the organ must retain optimal oxygenation levels."
"Organs such as the heart, lung, liver, and pancreas have, at the most, a duration of 6 hours after they are extracted from the human body; and this is under preservation conditions requiring advanced technology and an infrastructure that any hospital could hardly possess."
Dib Kuri comments: "The number of persons engaged in a surgical practice of this type, and the complex hospital infrastructure that it requires, make it extremely difficult to keep this type of crime clandestine, in the event that anyone were to attempt to deal in organs."
"I can't imagine one of those 10 doctors that we have in Mexico who are capable of making a transplant becoming involved with a criminal organization engaged in such activities. These are not operations that can be performed in any old hospital."
"The recipient would not risk receiving an organ from anyone. All this is a mere rumor. I don't dare deny that there are stolen children, but it could be done for other purposes, such as prostitution; it is highly unlikely to be for the purpose of extracting and selling their organs."
On April 19, 1993, after Honduran Congresswoman Rosario Godoy de Osejo made accusations that "baby parts" trafficking was occurring in Honduras, the President of the Honduran Supreme Court, Orlando Lozano Martinez, stated: "These allegations have been coming forward for three years and we have not been able to prove anything nor find merit in them through investigation." On April 21, Honduran Attorney General Leonardo Matute Murillo stated that his office had investigated organ trafficking charges for more than one year and found nothing to support them. The spokesman for the Honduran police also stated that the police had investigated organ trafficking allegations and found them to be completely false.
On June 7, 1993, Mexico's El Financiero newspaper quoted Pablo Chapa, the director of complaints at Mexico City's attorney general's office, as stating, "I have not seen a single case where a person has been kidnapped and has later appeared with scars where his organs were taken, or his eyes were taken away. If these famous clandestine hospitals existed, we would have found out about them immediately." Dr. Arturo Dib Kuri, director of Mexico's National Registry of Transplants, stated, "I compare the rumor of stolen children whose organs are sold for transplant to a story saying that several thieves stole three [space] ships from Cape Canaveral to go to the moon."
In April 1996, French folklorist Veronique Campion-Vincent completed an extremely comprehensive 285-page study for the French Transplant Organization entitled Transplantation, Rumor, and the Media: Accounts of Organ Theft. Her voluminous and extremely thorough examination concluded unequivocally that organ theft rumors are an unfounded urban legend.
The Rumor's Adverse Impacts
The false "baby parts" rumor has done tremendous damage in a number of different ways.
Most dramatically, it led to attacks on Americans and others in Guatemala during March 1994. On March 8, a mob in a Guatemalan town burned the police station in which an American wrongly suspected of child kidnapping had been held. The mob resisted the efforts of several hundred riot police and was not quieted until army troops and armored vehicles arrived to restore order. On March 29, an American tourist, June Weinstock, was savagely beaten by a mob, which accused her of abducting a Guatemalan child. A mob surrounded the building where Weinstock was being protected by local authorities, broke in, and dragged her out after a five-hour siege. Weinstock was pelted with rocks and beaten with pieces of firewood, suffering multiple broken bones, internal injuries, and severe head injuries that caused serious, long-term damage. She remains unable to speak or walk and requires 24-hour nursing care.
In addition to assaults on Americans, Guatemalan media reported numerous attempted lynchings by angry mobs that believed that "strangers" were allegedly stealing their children. A Swiss volcanologist, a Salvadoran family visiting relatives, foreign assistance workers, backpackers, and Guatemalan citizens all reportedly suffered such attacks.
The hysteria generated by this rumor has had an adverse impact on intercountry adoptions in a number of countries, according to adoption groups. In May 1991, the Turkish government announced that it was suspending intercountry adoptions because of the rumor. Adoptions have also been suspended or hindered in Honduras, Guatemala, Brazil, Mexico, and many other countries. As a result, some children who might have found loving homes remain in orphanages. The government of Bulgaria has even gone so far as to require prospective adoptive parents from foreign countries to sign a form stating, "I will not permit my child to be an organ donor nor allow the child to give organs or be a part of any medical experiments."
The rumor has also led to groundless, but widespread fears among parents in Latin America and elsewhere who believe that their child might be kidnapped for the purpose of organ transplantation.
Finally, the rumor is probably also causing an indirect but very real loss of life. Voluntary organ donation is a very altruistic activity, and one that can be adversely affected by any perception of impropriety or illicit behavior. Worldwide, there are long waiting lists for organ transplants that exceed donor supply and, as a result, people die every day because of the lack of sufficient donor organs. To the extent that the organ theft rumor has been believed, it has very likely decreased voluntary organ donation, and thereby caused many premature deaths.
1993: The Rumor is Given Credence in Television Documentaries
In November 1993, two hour-long television documentaries, one British/Canadian and the other French, gave credence to the "baby parts" rumor. Both programs contained numerous errors.
The British/Canadian program, The Body Parts Business, featured the claim of an eight-year old Honduran child, Charlie Alvarado, that he had been kidnapped by people who said they intended to sell his organs. Alvarado claimed that he had escaped after four days of captivity.
What the program did not mention was that Alvarado identified a German and a Swiss volunteer who worked at local children's homes as his alleged kidnappers. Both were arrested and held for six days while the case was investigated. After the investigation, the judge dismissed the case as a fabrication. The boy could not remember the day on which he had allegedly been kidnapped and had no bruises from the ropes with which he claimed he had been tied.
The Body Parts Business also featured an interview with the family of Pedro Reggi, who had been a patient at the Montes de Oca mental institution in Argentina. In the film, it is alleged that Reggi was blinded when his corneas were forcibly removed.
A few days after the program was broadcast, Reggi and his half-brother appeared on the Argentine television program Hora Clave and retracted the allegation, stating that Reggi had lost his eyesight due to an "infection." A subsequent investigation revealed that he had suffered from "bilateral congenital cataracts" as an infant and had severe eye problems in the mid-1980s that were judged to be inoperable. He lost his eyesight due to disease.
The French program Organ Snatchers also highlighted the false Pedro Reggi claim. In addition, it wrongly suggested that clandestine organ trafficking might be occurring in the United States. The program's examination of the situation the United States, however, included no interviews with any transplant physicians or surgeons or anyone knowledgeable about the requirements of organ transplantation. The only person it included was a professor of women's studies and medical ethics who believed that clandestine organ trafficking might be occurring, but had no evidence of this.
The French program concluded with a dramatic sequence in which a mother in Colombia claimed that after she took her young son Jeison to a hospital for diarrhea, he emerged blind because his corneas had been stolen. The blind boy, misidentified as Jenson, was shown on the pages of Life magazine in October 1993, playing a flute.
On February 4, 1994, the Colombian government's Office of Human Rights issued a report on its investigation of these allegations. It stated that Jeison had gone blind due to disease. After he was admitted to a Colombian hospital in February 1983, at four months of age, he was found to be suffering from multiple illnesses, including "severe bilateral eye infection [which] had produced perforations of the corneas, conjunctivitis, and drainage of purulent matter from each of his corneas." The prognosis was for a total loss of vision, which, according to Jeison's medical records, occurred on February 23, 1983.
In short, the "revelations" of alleged organ and cornea trafficking in both programs turned out to be groundless.
Prestigious International Organizations Examine the Rumor
In addition to the media attention generated by the British/Canadian and French programs, both the European Parliament and United Nations have issued reports that have given credence to the "baby parts" rumor.
On February 25, 1993, the European Parliament issued a report on prohibiting trade in transplant organs that made many valuable suggestions but also included the unsubstantiated claim that "there is evidence that fetuses, children, and adults in some developing countries have been mutilated and others murdered with the aim of obtaining transplant organs for export to rich countries." The report, drafted by the former French Minister of Health and then-European Member of Parliament Leon Schwartzenberg, claimed that "to deny the existence of such trafficking is comparable to denying the existence of the ovens and gas chambers during the last war."
On September 14, 1993, The European Parliament adopted a resolution on prohibiting trade in transplant organs based on this report. In subsequent days, Mr. Schwartzenberg revealed that the source for most of his information had been an article in the August 1992 issue of Le Monde Diplomatique. This article was written by French journalist Maite Pinero, a former correspondent for the French communist newspaper L'Humanite, who, since April 1987, has written numerous articles that consistently give credence to organ theft allegations, even long after they have been repudiated or discredited. The claims in Le Monde Diplomatique, which Mr. Schwartzenberg repeated, were groundless.
A former U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Sale of Children, Vitit Muntarbhorn, also gave credence to the rumor in several reports he issued from 1991 to 1994. The Special Rapporteur depended largely on press accounts, which included many mistakes, and offered no credible evidence of trafficking in children's organs. In the June 26, 1995 issue of Newsweek, Myriam Tebourbi, a U.N. employee who assisted the Special Rapporteur, commented, "We never had any real evidence. He had lots of allegations, but nothing concrete .... We had no resources to mount our own investigation."
1994-1996: The Rumor Attains Unprecedented Credibility
On March 7, 1994, Eric Sottas, director of the Geneva-based World Organization Against Torture, repeated various claims of "baby parts" trafficking in a 15-page paper that received wide publicity. Mr. Sottas also incorrectly stated that only one-fifth of U.S. organ transplants are centrally recorded and wrongly implied that organ sales are permitted in the United States. In fact, organ sales are illegal in the U.S. and all organ transplants are centrally recorded and monitored.
In May 1994, Spanish journalist Jose Manuel Martin Medem published a 200-page book Ninos de Repuesto (Spare-Parts Children), which credulously repeated many previous "baby parts" allegations. Despite researching the subject for six years, the author apparently did not realize that many of the charges he mentioned had been repudiated or disproved years earlier.
In January 1995, Eye Snatchers, an edited version of Organ Snatchers, was broadcast on M-6, a major television station in France. Eye Snatchers repeated the allegations about the Argentine youth Pedro Reggi and the Colombian child Jeison, both of which had been decisively disproved one year earlier. It made no mention of the fact that its main alleged "smoking gun" cases of cornea theft had been disproved. It simply ignored these facts as if they had not occurred.
In May 1995, Eye Snatchers received France's prestigious Albert-Londres prize in the audio-visual department, having been voted by a panel of journalists to be the best television program of the year in France.
The Colombian government was so outraged by the award of this prestigious journalism prize to a program that falsely accused Colombian doctors of stealing eyes from living children that it flew Jeison to Paris for an examination by a team of French doctors.
Jeison and his father arrived in Paris in August 1995 and the boy was examined by three prominent French doctors: Dr. Gilles Renard, of the Ophthalmological Service of the Hotel-Dieu Hospital; Dr. Marc Gentilini, of the Infectious and Tropical Diseases branch of the Pitie-Salpetriere Hospital; and Dr. Alain Fischer, of the Pediatric Immunology Service of Necker Hospital. The report on their examination of Jeison stated unequivocally that the boy had not had his eyes or corneas stolen. It reported that a stump of the eyeball and a number of fragments of corneal tissue remained in his eye sockets, proof that the corneas and the eye had not been removed. The condition of Jeison's eyes was exactly what would have been expected as a result of the disease from which he had suffered, as recorded in his medical records.
Shortly after this report was released, the panel that had awarded the Albert-Londres prize to Eye Snatchers decided to suspend the prize, pending further investigation.
Meanwhile, on March 18, 1996, a series of articles repeating "baby parts" claims in the Brazilian newspaper Correio Braziliense was awarded the "King of Spain" prize for journalism. The articles repeated the long-disproved Jeison and Pedro Reggi charges and many other false claims that had appeared in the world press. The series' author, Ana Beatriz Magno, admitted in the March 20 issue of the Spanish newspaper El Pais that "I can only reproduce what the international press has written" on this issue and that she did not seek to verify any of the claims she had repeated.
Also on March 20, 1996, the Albert-Londres panel in France decided to reaffirm its award to Eye Snatchers, although with numerous "reservations." The panel criticized the program for having been "too categorical" in its allegations of cornea theft, which it admitted that the great majority of ophthalmologists thought were groundless, and admonished the program's producer, Marie-Monique Robin, for having "allowed herself to be carried away with emotion," for having made "unnecessarily injurious judgments," and for having been insufficiently skeptical of the claims of cornea theft. Despite these many criticisms, the panel nevertheless reaffirmed its award of the prize. In its statement, the panel did not address, or indicate that it had sought to examine, most of the errors in the program. Instead, it appears to have focused almost exclusively on Jeison case, which had been hotly contested in France. Commenting on the panel's decision, the French magazine Telerama wondered: "How is it possible for the Albert Londres jury to justify the award of its prize to an investigation that they themselves judge to have little reliability?"
Conclusion
Despite the fact that it is totally unfounded, the "baby parts" rumor is now perceived as fact and accepted as conventional wisdom in large parts of the world. It has generated hysteria in Central American countries, led to brutal, unprovoked attacks on Americans and others, disrupted the lives of numerous prospective adoptive parents and the children they wished to adopt, won prestigious media awards in Europe, caused major disruptions in cornea donations in Latin America, and is, in all likelihood, causing numerous premature deaths because of its adverse effects on organ donation.
This sensationalistic rumor springs from deep, irrational, but very powerful anxieties stirred by advances in the life-saving process of organ transplantation. These fears have unfortunately been fanned by some who have cynically advanced this rumor for political purposes. The false rumor has also been propagated by many others who genuinely believe it. As a result of this cycle of events, the "baby parts" myth has now attained such widespread currency that it continues to feed on itself and, tragically, is widely believed despite numerous corrective statements, authoritative statements pointing to the impossibility of such practices occurring, and the fact that despite almost ten years of searching, no government, non-governmental organization, intergovernmental body, or investigative journalist has ever produced any credible evidence to support the charges.
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(Distributed by the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
