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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   30018 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024

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You missed the part where Chinese doctors have privately admitted to harvesting the organs of Uyghurs in these camps; that numerous Chinese people have given testimony that they were told they would be able to receive a vital organ transplant on a specific day (only possible if the surgeons in question knew that a specific person with a viable organ would die on that day i.e. it's impossible that the organ came from an unforeseen traffic accident); that the rate at which China conducts organ transplants is far in excess of the number of people who have signed up to the voluntary donor list; and that even the number of people China executes every year is insufficient to explain the shortfall (even assuming that any transplanted organs came from people who had been executed - not a doctor and open to correction, but I imagine a lethal dose of sodium thiopental would probably irreparably destroy a heart or liver).

(even assuming that any transplanted organs came from people who had been executed - not a doctor and open to correction, but I imagine a lethal dose of sodium thiopental would probably irreparably destroy a heart or liver)

I don't think the usual injection regimen (anaesthetic/muscle relaxant/potassium chloride) destroys organs - certainly not to the degree that most natural toxins like amanitin, diphtheria toxin or ricin do. The cause of death from lethal injection is failure to get oxygen to the brain, not cytotoxicity, and the brain is far more sensitive to that than any other organ. Obviously, the organs of a clinically-dead body die if not removed relatively quickly, regardless of cause of death, but when you're doing a planned execution that's pretty trivial to avoid. They do also execute people by shooting them, and a shot to the head is about the ideal scenario for a transplant assuming you have the equipment on hand.

With death by firing squad, aren't riflemen typically instructed to aim for the heart rather than the head?

WP says it's not actually a firing squad; it's a single point-blank shot, apparently usually an assault-rifle hollowpoint to the head (which, credit where it's due, is about as reliably painless as executions get).

That's fair. Assuming this is the preferred method of execution in China, they're probably a source of some of the organs transplanted.

Apparently most of them these days are lethal injection rather than the bullet to the head, but as I said I think the organs from the former would still be usable anyway.

Googling this, one of the first results was an NPR article, which is mostly about the damage that lethal injections inflicts on the lungs (it certainly sounds like lungs wouldn't be viable for transplant after a lethal injection, and China carries out 250 such transplants a year), but also mentions the effect on the heart in passing:

Lubarsky warns that if the first drug isn't anesthetizing the inmate, then they're likely to feel not only the suffocating sensation of pulmonary edema, but also the pain of the third drug: potassium chloride.

"It's like a burning cocktail coursing through your veins," says Lubarsky, referring to potassium chloride. "Once it reaches the heart, it stops the heart, and you do die. But in the process there is a period of just intense and searing pain."

WRT lungs: huh, TIL.

WRT heart: my understanding is that KCl does exactly that: stop the heart. There's a difference between cardiac arrest (the heart is not beating) and cardiac necrosis (the heart muscle cells are dying); AFAIK KCl does the former but not the latter. Obviously, both of these do tend to cause the other over time, but my guess is that if you took the heart out reasonably fast it wouldn't actually die.

Gotcha, thanks.

I imagine it's more like "pistol shot in the back of the head while walking them down the hallway".

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