As controversy brews in Kerala after Kochi’s Lakeshore Hospital was accused of transplanting a young man’s organs before confirming his brain death, a Malayalam film released in 2018 has now become a point of debate for an eerily similar plot. Joseph, directed by M Padmakumar and starring actor Joju George in the lead, was a crime thriller about a clandestine organ trade mafia run with the help of a prominent private hospital. In the film, an accident is purposefully staged to inflict brain injury on a character, whose organs are then harvested and donated to a foreign recipient, with the hospital minting a huge amount of money. The transplantation process bypasses several Indians on the waiting list, ensuring that the organs go to the foreign recipient.
In the ongoing controversy involving Lakeshore Hospital, a young man named Abin met with a two-wheeler accident on November 29, 2009 and was rushed to Mar Baselios Hospital Kothamangalam. He was later moved to Lakeshore on November 30, where he was declared brain dead and his organs harvested for transplant to a Malaysian national. Following this, his family alleged medical negligence by both hospitals.
A complaint was then filed by Dr S Ganapathy from Kollam, after he read the details of the transplantation through a newspaper report in 2019. According to Dr Ganapathy’s complaint, the Apnea test, which is mandatory to confirm brain death, was not conducted in Abin’s case, suggesting that the hospital rushed into harvesting Abin’s organs without doing everything to save his life and without confirming he was brain dead.
Abin’s family initially did not have suspicions, but when they learned that the autopsy report mentioned a collection of blood in Abin’s brain that should have been evacuated and could have likely saved his life, they felt that the hospital was allegedly hiding something.
In the wake of the allegations, several Malayali netizens took to social media to establish the incident’s similarities with the narrative of Joju George’s Joseph. A similarity between the movie and Abin’s case is that the recipients are foreign nationals. In Abin’s case, one of his organs was donated to a Malaysian citizen. Some, meanwhile, have criticised the mainstream media for pandering to sensationalism before knowing exactly what happened in the case. Such coverage could severely impact the process of cadaver organ donation by perpetuating the stigma around it and discourage people from signing up as organ donors, they alleged.
Gopakumar Mukundan, an adjunct faculty at the Centre for Socio-Economic and Environmental Studies (CSES), pointed out in a Facebook post that the case against Lakeshore Hospital has been registered prima facie by the Magistrate, and that the accused hospital’s side was yet to be heard. “Let the trial take place. If a crime has been committed, let there be punishment. But we should realise that this is not a case that should undergo a media trial without hearing the side of the accused, examining the documents they provide, or examining and cross-examining their witnesses,” he said.