(Image) Ms Elisabeth Tercero visiting the grave of her son, Mr Luis Picado, who died after a kidney operation. Mr Luis Picado's mother remembers the day her son thought he had won the lottery. He came home to their tin-roofed cinder-block house in a slum in Managua, Nicaragua, and said he had found a way to escape poverty and start a new life in the United States.
An American man had promised to give Mr Picado, a 23-year-old high school dropout who worked as a construction labourer, a job and an apartment in New York if he would donate one of his kidneys. He jumped at the deal, his mother said.
Three weeks later, in May 2009, Mr Picado came out of surgery at Managua's Military Hospital, bleeding internally from the artery doctors had severed to remove his kidney, according to medical records.
"I told my boy not to worry, that I would take care of him," Ms Elizabeth Tercero, 49, said. "But it was too late."
Mr Picado bled to death as doctors tried to save him, according to a coroner's report. "He was always chasing the American dream, and finally, it cost him his life," she said.
Mr Matthew Ryan, the American man, suffered a similar fate. The 68-year-old retired bus company supervisor in New York died two months after receiving Mr Picado's kidney in the same hospital.
Nicaraguan post-mortem reports cited the transplant as a cause of death for both men. Prosecutors in Managua are now investigating whether anyone broke a Nicaraguan law that prohibits paying a donor for an organ.
The case has prompted the Nicaraguan Ministry of Health to start writing tougher rules on transplants, and Congress will decide whether to approve them.
It is illegal in Nicaragua to sell an organ but the law is vague and bans transplants only if there is no proof of the donor's consent, said Mr Norwin Solano, a human rights lawyer in Managua.
Every year, about 5,000 gravely ill people from countries including the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia pay others to donate an organ, said Dr Francis Delmonico, a Harvard Medical School professor and surgeon.
Affluent, often desperately ill patients travel to countries such as Egypt, Peru and the Philippines, where poor people sell them their organs.
But the global demand far exceeds the available supply. In the US, 110,693 people are on waiting lists for organs and fewer than 15,000 donors are found annually. Source
