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Frederike Ambagtsheer, Assistant Professor (Internal Medicine, Kidney Transplantation & Nephrology), Erasmus University Medical Center

Illegal organ trade is more sophisticated than one might think - who's behind it and how it could be controlled

A Sudanese man who testified to selling a kidney to traffickers in 2017. Oliver Weiken/picture alliance via Getty Images

Every now and then the trade in human organs makes national, even international, news.

In March 2023, a Nigerian politician, his wife and a medical middleman were found guilty of an organ-trafficking plot after they brought a man to the UK from Lagos to sell his kidney. Several months later in Kenya, following the arrest of a televangelist on charges of a mass killing of his followers, autopsies on the corpses revealed missing organs, raising suspicions of forced organ harvesting. And, in 2020, researcher Sean Columb exposed how numerous African migrants sold their kidneys in Cairo, Egypt, in hopes of using the earnings to pay smugglers to take them across the Mediterranean into Europe.

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