The Cabinet Secretary in the ministry of health Aden Duale has issued a statement on alleged organ trafficking in Mediheal hospital Eldoret.

Alleged organ trafficking at Mediheal Hospital-Eldoret

In the statement issued by the cs health Aden Duale, there were concerns from Transplantation society to the Ministry dated 20th July 2023 over concerns of a syndicate trafficking organs in the country by evading existing regulations in the country.

There was also information from Israel source indicating thatseveral kidney transplants involving trafficked foreign kidney donors had taken place specifically at Mediheal Hospital Eldoret.

Multidisciplinary team formed

According to Aden Duale, The ministry of health having received the information, constituted a multidisciplinary team consisting of Kidney transplant specialists, an ethicist, representatives from the Kenya Blood transfussion and Transplant services secretariat, The Kenya Medical practitioners and dentists council, ministry of health administration and academic experts.

The terms of service of the multidisciplinary team was to verifying concerns raised by the Transplantation society, auditing transplant services at the hospital and providing actionable recommendations based on the findings.

Findings of the multidisciplinary investigative team

1. Mediheal Hospital and Facility Centre was a level 5 hospital approved to conduct Kidney transplantation and had conducted 372 kidney transplants in 5years with majority of transplant cases from the Kenya, East Africa community and a few international cases (Australia, Israek, Japan, USA, UK)
2. The facility had adapted new technologies as 99% of their transplants were conducted laparoscopicaly, with induction prior to the transplants all donations were from living donors and consent to donate was available in all sampled files.
3. The facility lacked sufficient documentation to verify relationships between donors and recipients. The documents availed indicate some of the donors acame from different nationalities.
4. All the human leukocyte Antigen (HLA) tests that enables distinction of self and non self were done in india without the requisite approval of Ministry of Health for shipment of human samples outside the country.
5. There was no translation of documents for both donors and recipients who could not understand English.
6. There were high risk transplantations including for patient with confirmed prostate cancer and extreme of age.
7. Transplants were conducted despite poor donor-recipient compatibility.
8. The facility lacked clinical morbidity and mortality reports.

Recommendations of multidisciplinary investigative team