In 2015 China promised the world they would no longer source organs from prisoners - their almost sole source previously. The Chinese government may have been systematically misreporting the number of organs it claims it has voluntarily collected since 2010, according to new research published in BMC Medical Ethics.
However, the study, led by PhD scholar Matthew Robertson from The Australian National University (ANU), used statistical forensics on official Chinese datasets. Our research shows Beijing's reported organ donation numbers don't stack up and there is highly compelling evidence that they are being falsified," Mr Robertson said.
"The figures appear to have been based on a simple mathematical formula, a quadratic function, which would be familiar to many high school students. "When you take a close look at the numbers of organs apparently collected they almost match this artificial equation point for point, year in, year out. They're too neat to be true. "These figures don't appear to be real data from real donations. They're numbers generated using an equation.
