The Red Market (do NOT click if you're squeamish)

[Viking 1]

During the mid-2000s, Scott Carney was living in southern India and teaching American anthropology students on their semester abroad when one of his charges died, apparently a suicide. For two days, he watched over her body while the provincial police investigated her death, reporters bribed their way into the morgue to photograph the newsworthy corpse, local doctors performed an autopsy, and ice had to be rounded up to retard decomposition. Finally, his boss asked Carney to take pictures of the girl's mangled remains for analysis by forensic experts back in the States.

This unsettling experience gave Carney his first inkling of how a human being becomes a thing. When he abandoned academia for investigative journalism (he writes for Wired, Mother Jones and other publications), his South Asian surroundings offered him many examples of the ways human bodies -- in part or in whole -- are transformed into commodities. He calls this the "red market," a term that encompasses the trade (legal and illegal) in human bones, blood, organs, embryos, surrogate pregnancy and living children.

"The Red Market: On the Trail of the World's Organ Brokers, Bone Thieves, Blood Farmers, and Child Traffickers" is the alarming product of Carney's research. It includes vivid, on-the-spot reports from Indian "bone farms," where remains looted from graveyards are processed into skeletons for Western anatomy students (hundreds of reeking bones left out to bleach in the sun) and tsunami refugee camps where most of the residents bear the scars of kidney "donations." Carney relays these tales with enough florid touches ("Toads the size of baseball mitts hop across the muddy track") to make them seem downright hallucinatory.

Freakish as these stories can be -- none more so than the dairy farmer who kept several men prisoner in sheds, some for more than three years, extracting their blood to sell to a nearby hospital -- they are the secret face of the age of modern medical miracles. Poor people supply human flesh in various forms for rich people, while a well-meaning ethical system of anonymity and mandated "altruism" allows middlemen to siphon off most of the profits.

http://www.salon.com/books/laura_miller/2011/05/29/red_market

Utterly horrid, but it's better than doing shit to innocent animals. Yeah, I said it.

[Odin2005]

1. OMG!

:puke:

[napoleon_in_rags]

2. If you peel away a certain veneer, this is what remains.

Cannibalism. Just think of all the nice sweaters on golf courses and this lies behind it. The modern world depends a great deal on psychologically protective illusions.