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Child Trafficked To Britain By Organleggers

For the first time, a child has been smuggled into Britain for the purposes of organ harvesting by "organleggers", a word derived by sf writer Larry Niven from the phrase "bootlegger". The word appeared in his 1967 story The Jigsaw Man.

The unnamed girl was brought to the UK from Somalia with the intention of removing her organs and selling them on to those desperate for a transplant.

Child protection charities warned that the case was unlikely to be an isolated incident as traffickers were likely to have smuggled a group of children into the country.

The case emerged in a government report which showed that the number of human trafficking victims in the UK has risen by more than 50 per cent last year and reached record levels.

Here's a quote from Niven's story:

His heart went into storage immediately. His skin followed, most of it in one piece, all of it still living. The doctor took him apart with exquisite care, like disassembling a flexible, fragile, tremendously complex jigsaw puzzle. The brain was flashburned and the ashes saved for urn burial; but all the rest of the body, in slabs and small blobs and parchment-thin layers and lengths of tubing, went into storage in the hospital's organ banks. Any one of these units could be packed in a travel case at a moment's notice and flown to anywhere in the world in not much more than an hour.

Also relevant - and possibly more to the point, given the specifics of the news story - is a reference to a similar idea in Anne McCaffrey's 1990 novel Pegasus in Flight, in which street children are stockpiled for later use as organ donors. Via The Telegraph.

Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 10/20/2013)

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