Chinese Teen Sells Kidney for iPad, iPod, and iPhone
A Chinese youth has put himself in critical condition after selling an organ illegally to buy Apple products.
Apple products are major status items now in our second decade of the 21st century. As the company’s impressive stockpile of cash can attest to, some $450 billion at last count, iPads, iPods, and iPhones are sought the world over for their performance and design, but also for the social cred conferred to their owners. Perhaps this is why people are donating their organs to the black market to get their hands on them.
As reported in the BBC News, five people have been arrested in China after a teenager there sold his kidney for $3,000, enough to purchase an iPad and iPhone. The teenage boy, a youth from the Hunan province of southern China, was reported to the authorities by his mother, who noticed the new electronics. When she asked where he got the money for them, he said he had sold his kidney. The teenager is now reportedly in renal failure, in a Hunan hospital. The group that has been detained, which includes the surgeon that performed the operation, earned an estimated $35,000 for the kidney, according to state-run Xin-Hua News.
