Specialists - who are demanding new national regulations on transplants - say poor, jobless and illiterate people living in the greater Manila area have become victims of an illegal kidney harvesting network.

'Right now, all transplantations on foreign patients are deemed suspended,' Health Undersecretary Alexander Padilla told a news conference.

The country's vascular transplant surgeons are observing a 'moratorium' on kidney transplants to foreign recipients while the government works with doctors to craft new regulations, he added.

Mr Padilla said that just under 1,000 kidney transplants are performed in the Philippines annually.

But the Philippine Society of Nephrology says the country is one of the world's 'hot spots' for organ harvesting, with recipients in the West and the Middle East paying up to US$30,000 (S$41,000) for new kidneys.

It says a 10 per cent cap on the number of transplants to foreign recipients, which went into effect in 2003, is regularly violated.

Between 2002 and 2005, the number of kidney transplants to foreign patients from living, non-related Filipino donors increased by 63 per cent, according to the group's vice president Benita Padilla.

The Society has also found 'clusters' of hundreds of donors, mostly farmers, and tricycle drivers in towns south-east of Manila who received US$2,700 from those who received their kidney 'donations'.

Selling or exporting human organs is punishable in the Philippines by jail terms of at least 20 years plus stiff fines.

The health undersecretary did not rule out the possibility of a full ban on transplants to foreign recipients, once the new guidelines are drafted. -- AFP