Organ harvesting rumors slammed

University of Chicago's Millis said years of silence on the subject has allowed lies to be peddled. Harvesting organs from criminals does not hap-pen in China, he said.

Former transplantation society president Francis Delmonico said on Thursday that the authors of the critical report should be questioned about how they acquired their data.

Huang Jiefu, director of China Organ Donation and Trans-plantation Commission, described the allegations as "nonsense" and "ridiculous". He said that transplantation surgeries performed in China annually accounted for 8.5 percent of the total number of transplantation surgeries worldwide.

Consumption of anti-rejection medications - which transplant patients must take for life after surgery to prevent their immune systems from attacking the organs - account for 8 percent of global consumption.

"The two numbers match, which is evidence that the speculation is groundless," Huang said. "Some organizations are just demonizing China in order to fulfill their political purposes."

The Human Organ Trans-plantation Regulation, a standardized legal framework for organ transplantation, has been in effect in China since 2007.

China banned the use of organs extracted from executed prisoners on Jan 1, 2015.

During the symposium, Huang, the commission director, said, "China has and will have zero tolerance for any violation of the country's regulations in organ donation and transplantation".

He added that even though China's organ donation and transplantation program is in its infancy, the country will not tolerate behavior such as retrieving organs from executed people.

Pena praised China's system as it managed to bring more than 2,700 voluntary donations, which means more than 10,500 patients received transplants in 2015.And there was a rapid increase of donation cases in the first half of this year. He said it is a clear demonstration that the system is fair.