Nearby Italy was shocked recently when it was reported that a woman wanted to sell one of her kidneys in exchange of cash. The 55-year-old woman told the newspaper where she wanted to advertise her desperate plea that she could not continue living, with her husband and son, on only e1,000 a month.

Her husband and her son were not making enough money for the family to survive. She said that she wanted not less than e100,000 to give up one of her kidneys, claiming that she was a healthy person who only suffered “a little from arthritis”. When told that what she wanted to do was illegal, her answer was “What else can I do? The only thing I’ve got left is my body”.

The newspaper she went to did not publish her advertisement, as it is against the law in Italy to sell one’s body organs, but picked on the story to highlight the financial difficulties some people are facing today. The woman’s predicament made the headlines on all television stations too.

There are various issues that this story brings to the fore, topmost of which is the desperation that some people have found themselves in. It is easy to blame everything on the current financial crisis that has hit the world, but that would be too simplistic a way of explaining matters. There have been people and there are people who, recession or no recession, have always found the going tough. While many of us enjoy the comforts of modern life, there are others who cannot make ends meet and barely scrape through till the end of the month.

There are some who, like this woman, are more desperate than others, and come to the bizarre conclusion that the only way out is to deprive oneself of a functional part of their body in exchange of money.

Now, this woman, in her desperation, went to the media to highlight her difficulties, perhaps not knowing that what she wanted to do went against the law.

How many others have not made their intentions public, and simply found a way to dispose of their kidneys for money? How many risked their lives by undergoing surgery is some unauthorised clinic in some back alley? How many did in fact die while trying to give up a kidney?

This story happened in Italy, considered to be one of the most developed countries in the world. If this is happening in modern Europe, what is happening in under-developed states, where people are perhaps more desperate for money?

Newspapers in Italy have reported that the illegal practice of selling one’s organs is more common than we would like to think. There are people who cannot wait or do not want to wait until an organ that is donated after death becomes available, and have the money to travel to third countries and undergo transplant surgery, receiving organs that others sell or are forced to give up.

There have been stories of desperate parents who deprive their own children of kidneys in order to earn some money that enables the rest of the family to survive. Of course, everything is carried out away from prying eyes, but the fact that this is not given too much attention by the media does not mean that it’s not happening.

There are poor people in Malta too. Perhaps none of them have arrived to the point of selling one’s kidney to make a living, although one cannot rule out the possibility. You never know.

But society can and must do more for these people.