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The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists
On Feb. 24, Ukrainian authorities made an alarming discovery: bones and other human tissues crammed into coolers in a grimy white minibus.
Investigators grew even more intrigued when they found, amid the body parts, envelopes stuffed with cash and autopsy results written in English.
What the security service had disrupted was not the work of a serial killer but part of an international pipeline of ingredients for medical and dental products that are routinely implanted into people around the world.
The seized documents suggested that the remains of dead Ukrainians were destined for a factory in Germany belonging to the subsidiary of a U.S. medical products company, Florida-based RTI Biologics.
RTI is one of a growing industry of companies that make profits by turning mortal remains into everything from dental implants to bladder slings to wrinkle cures.
The industry has flourished even as its practices have roused concerns about how tissues are obtained and how well grieving families and transplant patients are informed about the realities and risks of the business.
In the U.S. alone, the biggest market and the biggest supplier, an estimated two million products derived from human tissue are sold each year, a figure that has doubled over the past decade.
It is an industry that promotes treatments and products that literally allow the blind to see (through cornea transplants) and the lame to walk (by recycling tendons and ligaments for use in knee repairs). It's also an industry fueled by powerful appetites for bottom-line profits and fresh human bodies.
The business of recycling dead humans into medical implants is a little-known yet lucrative trade. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) discovered allegations of wrongdoing over the procurement of some of the raw materials used in the products. Find out more: www.icij.org/tissue.
In the Ukraine, for example, the security service believes that bodies passing through a morgue in the Nikolaev district, the gritty shipbuilding region located near the Black Sea, may have been feeding the trade, leaving behind what investigators described as potentially dozens of “human sock puppets” — corpses stripped of their reusable parts.
Industry officials argue that such alleged abuses are rare, and that the industry operates safely and responsibly.
For its part, RTI didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment or to a detailed list of questions provided a month before this publication.
In public statements the company says it “honors the gift of tissue donation by treating the tissue with respect, by finding new ways to use the tissue to help patients and by helping as many patients as possible from each donation.”
‘Our Misfortune'
Despite its growth, the tissue trade has largely escaped public scrutiny. This is thanks in part to less-than-aggressive official oversight — and to popular appeal for the idea of allowing the dead to help the living survive and thrive.
An eight-month, 11-country investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) has found, however, that the tissue industry’s good intentions sometimes are in conflict with the rush to make money from the dead.
Inadequate safeguards are in place to ensure all tissue used by the industry is obtained legally and ethically, ICIJ discovered from hundreds of interviews and thousands of pages of public documents obtained through records requests in six countries.
Despite concerns by doctors that the lightly regulated trade could allow diseased tissues to infect transplant recipients with hepatitis, HIV and other pathogens, authorities have done little to deal with the risks.
In contrast to tightly-monitored systems for tracking intact organs such as hearts and lungs, authorities in the U.S. and many other countries have no way to accurately trace where recycled skin and other tissues come from and where they go.
At the same time, critics say, the tissue-donation system can deepen the pain of grieving families, keeping them in the dark or misleading them about what will happen to the bodies of their loved ones.
Those left behind, like the parents of 19-year-old Ukrainian Sergei Malish, who committed suicide in 2008, are left to cope with a grim reality.
At Sergei’s funeral, his parents discovered deep cuts on his wrists. Yet they knew he had hanged himself.
They later learned that his body parts had been recycled and shipped off as “anatomical material.”
“They make money with our misfortune,” Sergei’s father said.
Awkward silence
During the transformational journey tissue undergoes — from dead human to medical device — some patients don’t even know that they are the final destination.
Doctors don’t always tell them that the products used in their breast reconstructions, penis implants and other procedures were reclaimed from the recently departed.
Nor are authorities always aware of where tissues come from or where they go.
The lack of proper tracking means that by the time problems are discovered some of the manufactured goods can’t be found. When the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention assists in the recall of products made from potentially tainted tissues, transplant doctors frequently aren’t much help.
“Oftentimes there’s an awkward silence. They say: ‘We don’t know where it went,’” said Dr. Matthew Kuehnert, the CDC’s director of blood and biologics.
“We have barcodes for our cereals" at breakfast, "but we don’t have barcodes for our human tissues," Kuehnert said. "Every patient who has tissue implanted should know. It’s so obvious. It should be a basic patient right. It is not. That’s ridiculous.”
Since 2002 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has documented at least 1,352 infections in the U.S. that followed human tissue transplants, according to an ICIJ analysis of FDA data. These infections were linked to the deaths of 40 people, the data shows.
One of the weaknesses of the tissue-monitoring system is the secrecy and complexity that come with the cross-border exchange of body parts.
The Slovaks export cadaver parts to the Germans; the Germans export finished products to South Korea and the U.S.; the South Koreans to Mexico; the U.S. to more than 30 countries.
Distributors of manufactured products can be found in the European Union, China, Canada, Thailand, India, South Africa, Brazil, Australia and New Zealand. Some are subsidiaries of multinational medical corporations.
The international nature of the industry, critics claim, makes it easy to move products from place to place without much scrutiny.
“If I buy something from Rwanda, then put a Belgian label on it, I can import it into the U.S. When you enter into the official system, everyone is so trusting,” said Dr. Martin Zizi, professor of neurophysiology at the Free University of Brussels.
Once a product is in the European Union, it can be shipped to the U.S. with few questions asked.
“They assume you’ve done the quality check," Zizi said. "We are more careful with fruit and vegetables than with body parts.”
Piece of the action
Inside the marketplace for human tissue, the opportunities for profits are immense. A single, disease-free body can spin off cash flows of $80,000 to $200,000 for the various non-profit and for-profit players involved in recovering tissues and using them to manufacture medical and dental products, according to documents and experts in the field.
It’s illegal in the U.S., as in most other countries, to buy or sell human tissue. However, it’s permissible to pay service fees that ostensibly cover the costs of finding, storing and processing human tissues.
Almost everyone gets a piece of the action.
Ground-level body wranglers in the U.S. can get as much as $10,000 for each corpse they secure through their contacts at hospitals, mortuaries and morgues. Funeral homes can act as middlemen to identify potential donors. Public hospitals can get paid for the use of tissue-recovery rooms.
And medical products multinationals like RTI? They do well, too. Last year RTI earned $11.6 million in pretax profits on revenues of $169 million.
Phillip Guyett, who ran a tissue recovery business in several U.S. states before he was convicted of falsifying death records, said executives with companies that bought tissues from him treated him to $400 meals and swanky hotel stays. They promised: “We can make you a rich man.” It got to the point, he said, that he began looking at the dead “with dollar signs attached to their parts.” Guyett never worked directly for RTI.
Smoked salmon
Human skin takes on the color of smoked salmon when it is professionally removed in rectangular shapes from a cadaver. A good yield is about six square feet.
After being mashed up to remove moisture, some is destined to protect burn victims from life-threatening bacterial infections or, once further refined, for breast reconstructions after cancer.
The use of human tissue “has really revolutionized what we can do in breast reconstruction surgery,” explains Dr. Ron Israeli, a plastic surgeon in Great Neck, N.Y.
“Since we started using it in about 2005, it’s really become a standard technique.”
A significant number of recovered tissues are transformed into products whose shelf names give little clue to their actual origin.
They are used in the dental and beauty industries, for everything from plumping up lips to smoothing out wrinkles.
Cadaver bone — harvested from the dead and replaced with PVC piping for burial — is sculpted like pieces of hardwood into screws and anchors for dozens of orthopedic and dental applications.
Or the bone is ground down and mixed with chemicals to form strong surgical glues that are advertised as being better than the artificial variety.
“At the basic level what we are doing to the body, it’s a very physical — and I imagine some would say a very grotesque — thing,” said Chris Truitt, a former RTI employee in Wisconsin.
“We are pulling out arm bones. We are pulling out leg bones. We are cutting the chest open to pull the heart out to get at the valves. We are pulling veins out from the inside of skin.”
Whole tendons, scrubbed cleaned and rendered safe for transplant, are used to return injured athletes to the field of play.
There’s also a brisk trade in corneas, both within countries and internationally.
Because of the ban on selling the tissue itself, the U.S. companies that first commercialized the trade adopted the same methods as the blood collection business.
The for-profit companies set up non-profit offshoots to collect the tissue — in much the same way the Red Cross collects blood that’s later turned into products by commercial entities.
Nobody charges for the tissue itself, which under normal circumstances is freely donated by the dead (via donor registries) or by their families.
Rather, tissue banks and other organizations involved in the process receive ill-defined “reasonable payments” to compensate them for obtaining and handling the tissue.
“The common lingo is to talk about procurement from donors as ‘harvesting,’ and the subsequent transfers via the bone bank as ‘buying’ and ‘selling,’ ” wrote Klaus Høyer, from the University of Copenhagen’s Department of Public Health, who talked to industry officials, donors and recipients for an article published in the journal BioSocieties.
“These expressions were used freely in interviews; however, I did not hear this terminology used in front of patients.”
A U.S.-government funded study of the families of U.S. tissue donors, published in 2010, indicates many may not understand the role that for-profit companies play in the tissue donation system.
Seventy-three percent of families who took part in the study said it was “not acceptable for donated tissue to be bought and sold, for any purpose.”
Few protections
There is an inherent risk in transplanting human tissues. Among other things, it has led to life-threatening bacterial infections, and the spread of HIV, Hepatitis C and rabies in tissue recipients, according to the CDC.
Modern blood and organ collection is bar-coded and strongly regulated — reforms prompted by high-profile disasters that had been caused by the poor screening of donors. Products made from skin and other tissues, however, have few specific laws of their own.
In the U.S., the agency that regulates the industry is the Food and Drug Administration, the same agency that’s charged with protecting the nation’s food supply, medicines and cosmetics.
The FDA, which declined repeated requests for on-record interviews, has no authority over health care facilities that implant the material. And the agency doesn’t specifically track infections.
It does keep track of registered tissue banks, and sometimes conducts an inspection. It also has the power to shut them down.
The FDA largely relies on standards that are set by an industry body, the American Association of Tissue Banks (AATB). The association refused repeated requests over four months for on-record interviews. It told ICIJ during a background interview last week that the "vast majority" of banks recovering traditional tissues such as skin and bone are accredited by the AATB. Yet an analysis of AATB accredited banks and FDA registration data shows about one third of tissue banks that recover traditional tissues such as skin and bone are accredited by the AATB.
The association says the chance of contamination in patients is low. Most products, the AATB says, undergo radiation and sterilization, rendering them safer than, say, organs that are transplanted into another human.
"Tissue is safe. It's incredibly safe," an AATB executive said.
There is little data, though, to back up the industry’s claims.
Unlike with other biologics regulated by the FDA, agency officials explain, firms that make medical products out of human tissues are required to report only the most serious adverse events they discover. That means that if problems do arise, there’s no guarantee that authorities are told.
And because doctors aren’t required to tell patients they’re getting tissue from a cadaver, many patients may not associate any later infection with the transplant.
On this point, the industry says it is able to track the products from the donors to the doctors, using their own coding systems, and that many hospitals have systems in place to track the tissues after they’re implanted.
But no centralized regional or global system assures products can be followed from donor to patient.
“Probably very few people get infected, but we really don’t know because we don’t have surveillance and we don’t have a system for detecting adverse events,” the CDC’s Kuehnert said.
The FDA recalled more than 60,000 tissue-derived products between 1994 and mid-2007.
The most famous recall came in 2005. It involved a company called Biomedical Tissue Services, which was run by a former dental surgeon, Michael Mastromarino.
Mastromarino got many of his raw materials from undertakers in New York and Pennsylvania. He paid them up to $1,000 per body, court records show.
His company stripped bodies of their bones, skin and other usable parts, then returned them to their families. The families, ignorant of what happened, buried or cremated the evidence.
One of more than 1,000 bodies that were dismembered was that of the famous BBC broadcaster and Masterpiece Theatre host Alistair Cooke.
Products made from the stolen human remains were shipped to Canada, Turkey, South Korea, Switzerland and Australia. More than 800 of those products have never been located.
It later came out in court that some of the tissue donors had died from cancer and that none had been tested for pathogens like HIV and hepatitis.
Mastromarino falsified donor forms, lying about causes of death and other details. He sold skin and other tissues to several U.S. tissue-processing firms, including RTI.
“From day one, everything was forged; everything, because we could. As long as the paperwork looked good, it was fine,” said Mastromarino, who is serving a 25-to-58-year prison sentence for conspiracy, theft and abuse of a corpse.
Global sheriff
Each country has its own set of regulations for the use of products made from human tissue, often based on laws that were originally intended to deal with blood or organs.
In practice, though, because the U.S. supplies an estimated two-thirds of the world’s human-tissue-product needs, the FDA has effectively been left to act as sheriff for much of the planet.
Foreign tissue establishments that wish to export products to the U.S. are required to register with the FDA.
Yet of the 340 foreign tissue establishments registered with the FDA, only about 7 percent have an inspection record in the FDA database, an ICIJ analysis shows. The FDA has never shut one down due to concern over illicit activities.
The data also shows that about 35 percent of active registered U.S. tissue banks have no inspection record in the FDA database.
“When the FDA registers you, all you have to do is fill out a form and wait for an inspection,” said Dr. Duke Kasprisin, the medical director for seven U.S. tissue banks. “For the first year or two you can function without having anyone look at you.”
This is backed by the data, which show the typical tissue bank operates for nearly two years before its first FDA inspection.
“The problem is there is no oversight. The FDA, all they require is that you have a registration,” said Craig Allred, an attorney previously involved in litigation against the industry. “Nobody is watching what is going on.” The FDA and industry players “all point the finger at each other.”
Yet in South Korea, for example, the booming plastic surgery market uses FDA oversight as a selling point.
In downtown Seoul, the country’s capital, Tiara Plastic Surgery explains that human tissue products “are FDA-approved” and are therefore safe.
Some medical centers advertise “FDA-approved AlloDerm” — a skin graft made from donated American cadavers — for nose enhancement.
Le Do-han, the official in charge of human tissue for the South Korean FDA, said the country imports 90 percent of its human-tissue needs.
Raw tissue is shipped in from the U.S. and Germany. This tissue, once processed, is often re-exported to Mexico as manufactured goods.
Despite the complicated movements back and forth, Le Do-han acknowledges that proper tracking hasn’t been put in place.
“It is like putting tags on beef, but I don’t even know if that is possible for human tissues because there are so many coming in.”
Teaming up
In its U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings, publicly traded RTI provides a glimpse of the company’s size and global reach.
In 2011, the company manufactured 500,000 to 600,000 implants and launched 19 new kinds of implants in sports medicine, orthopedics and other areas. Ninety percent of the company’s implants are made from human tissue, while 10 percent come from cows and pigs processed at its German facility.
RTI requires its human body parts suppliers in the U.S. and other nations to follow FDA regulations, but the company acknowledges there are no guarantees.
In 2011 securities filings, RTI said there “can be no assurances” that “our tissue suppliers will comply with such regulations intended to prevent communicable disease transmission” or “even if such compliance is achieved, that our implants have not been or will not be associated with transmission of disease.”
Like many of today’s for-profit tissue companies that were once non-profits, RTI broke away from the non-profit University of Florida Tissue Bank in 1998.
Internal company files from Tutogen, a Germany medical products company, show that RTI teamed up with Tutogen as early as September 1999 to help both companies meet their growing needs for raw material by obtaining human tissue from Eastern Europe.
The companies both obtained tissue from the Czech Republic. Tutogen separately obtained tissues from Estonia, Hungary, Russia, Latvia, Ukraine, and later Slovakia, documents show.
In 2002, allegations surfaced in the Czech media that the local supplier to RTI and Tutogen was obtaining some tissues there improperly. Though there is no suggestion that Tutogen or RTI or its employees did anything improper.
In March 2003, police in Latvia investigated whether Tutogen’s local supplier had removed tissue from about 400 bodies at a state forensic medical institute without proper consent.
Wood and fabrics, replacing muscle and bone, were put into the deceased to make it look like they were untouched before burial, local media reported.
Police eventually charged three employees of the supplier, but later dismissed the charges when a court ruled that no consent from donors’ families was necessary. Again, there was no suggestion Tutogen acted improperly.
In 2005, Ukrainian police launched the first of a series of investigations into the activities of Tutogen’s suppliers in that country. The initial investigation did not lead to criminal charges.
The relationship between Tutogen and RTI, meanwhile, became even closer in late 2007, when they announced a merger between the two companies. Tutogen became a subsidiary of RTI in early 2008.
Officials at RTI declined to answer questions from ICIJ about whether it knew about police investigations of Tutogen’s suppliers.
Two ribs
In 2008 Ukrainian police launched a new investigation, looking into allegations that more than 1,000 tissues a month were being illegally recovered at a forensic medical institute at Krivoy Rog and sent, via a third party, to Tutogen. Joseph Düsel, the Chief Prosecutor in Bamberg, said in 2009 that "what the company is doing is approved by the administrative authority by which it is also monitored. We do not currently see any reason to initiate investigation proceedings."
Nataliya Grishenko, the judge prosecuting the case, revealed during subsequent court proceedings that many relatives claimed they’d been tricked into signing consent forms or that their signatures had been forged.
However, the main suspect in the case — a Ukrainian doctor — died before the court could deliver a verdict. The case died with him.
Tutogen “operates under very strict regulations from German and Ukrainian authorities as well as other European and American regulatory authorities,” the company said in a statement while the case was still pending. “They have been inspected regularly by all of these authorities over their many years of operation, and Tutogen remains in good standing with all of them.”
Seventeen of Tutogen’s Ukrainian suppliers have undergone an FDA inspection. The inspections are announced, according to protocol, six to eight weeks in advance.
Only one — BioImplant in Kiev — received negative feedback. Among the findings of the 2009 inspection: not all morgues could rely on hot running water and some sanitation procedures were not followed.
FDA inspectors also identified deficiencies with RTI's Ukrainian imports when it visited the company's facilities in Florida.
RTI had English translations, but not original autopsy reports, from its Ukrainian donors, FDA inspectors found during a 2010 audit. Those were often the only medical documents the company used to determine whether the donor was healthy, inspectors noted in their report.
The company told inspectors it was illegal under Ukrainian law to copy the report. But following the inspection it began maintaining the original Russian-language document along with its English translation.
In 2010 and 2011, FDA inspectors asked RTI to change how it labeled its imports. The company was obtaining Ukrainian tissue, shipping it to Tutogen in Germany, then exporting it to the U.S. as a product of Germany.
While the company agreed to change its policies, there is some indication that it may have continued labeling some Ukrainian tissue as German.
This past February police launched a raid as officials at a regional forensic bureau in Nikolaev Oblast were loading harvested human tissues into the back of a white minibus. Police footage of the seizure shows tissue labeled "Tutogen. Made in Germany."
In this case, the security service said forensic officials had tricked relatives of the dead patients into agreeing to what they thought was a small amount of tissue harvesting by playing on their pain and grief.
Seized documents — blood tests, an autopsy report and labels written in English and obtained by ICIJ — suggested the remains were on their way to Tutogen.
Some of the tissue fragments found on the bus came from 35-year-old Oleksandr Frolov, who had died from an epileptic seizure.
“On the way to the cemetery, when we were in the hearse, one of his feet — we noticed that one of the shoes slipped off his foot, which seemed to be hanging loose,” his mother, Lubov Frolova, told ICIJ.
“When my daughter-in-law touched it, she said that his foot was empty.”
Later, the police showed her a list of what had been taken from her son’s body.
“Two ribs, two Achilles heels, two elbows, two eardrums, two teeth, and so on. I couldn’t read it till the end, as I felt sick. I couldn’t read it,” she said.
“I heard that" the tissues "were shipped to Germany to be used for the plastic surgeries and also for donation. I have nothing against donation, but it should be done according to the law.”
Kateryna Rahulina, whose 52-year-old mother, Olha Dynnyk, died in September 2011, was shown documents by investigating police. The documents purported to give her approval for tissue to be taken from her mother’s body.
“I was in shock,” Rahulina said. She never signed the papers, she said, and it was clear to her that someone had forged her approval.
The forensic bureau in Nikolaev Oblast, where the alleged incidents happened, was, until recently, one of 20 Ukrainian tissue banks registered by the FDA.
On the FDA’s website the phone number for each of the tissue banks is the same.
It is Tutogen’s phone number in Germany.
Contributors to this story: Mar Cabra, Alexenia Dimitrova and Nari Kim.
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists is an independent global network of reporters who collaborate on cross-borders investigative stories. To see video, graphics and more stories in this series, go to www.icij.com/tissue. This story was co-reported by National Public Radio.
Leave a Comment:
Ghouls
Good grief.... someone, PLEASE stand over my body and make sure it gets rolled into the oven after I die! I can't trust the funeral director.
U.S. insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and politicians make a lot of money off of live people with diseases and other ailments. They even play god by deciding who lives and dies if the treatment a person needs is "covered" or not. How is this any worse? At least these people are already dead.
An "unregulated" industry.... This seems to be an invitation for criminals to come on in, we can rip people off big time--NOBODY'S LOOKING. After all, Bankers got away with it. And our paid congresspeople will look the other way.
The Matrix was spot on. We the people--even we the dead people-- have become the batteries that make the criminals thrive.
When you go to the RTI site it makes a good case for how careful they are in getting consent from relatives and getting a history of the tissues etc. from each donor that they treat with the ultimate respect in a surgical setting.................Makes a lot of sense, BUT.....
This all happens in a cooler chest thrown in the back of a truck along with a lot of cash it seems
Unregulated free enterprise the American way at its best. Go Romeny Go.
Shanad - my thoughts exactly! Hey I don't think it should be free here you go, but what is going on right now is ethically and morally corrupt and needs to change. But yes these people at least have the benefit (very small mind you) of being dead. Some day I hope we can get this taken care off.
It is time
I'm sorry but how sick and twisted can an industry be? And with little or no regulation on our supposed "look the other way but hand me the cash" companies. Didn't really believe in zombies but this article put a whole new light on the subject. Ghouls for Healthcare......??? Damn..............Reminds me of the time a few decades ago when the cosmetic industry was using collagen from human fetus's fresh from the abortion clinics. WTF is happening to our world?
Humanity has become so depraved that I wouldn't doubt we all go the way of Atlantis. Poof!
This is really no different than organ donation. Where else would we get the stem cells for research?
However, I think that there should be more regulations put in to protect the donors.
bumper sticker ;; i'm not selling my fingers when i die...but i'll give you one for free while i'm alive...
I get why people would be upset by this, but if my body parts can be useful when i'm dead....i'd rather them help someone than be burned or stuck in the ground.
Wow, just like the banking industry, politicians believe that companies do such a fine job of policing themselves. Unless things change, I'm pulling myself off the donor list.
Now we know where Cheney got three hearts in two years..he buys them like shopping at Walmart.
Jeessuusss! We need less regulation like we need a hole in the head!
Have to admit, I didn't read the entire article. After the first few paragraphs, all I could think was it seems that we are all now just another commodity to trade for $$$. Wish I wouldn't have even read what I did, should have just trusted my gut after seeing the headline and deleted it (as I do with many other articles.)
:O
Thank you NBC. This should give me nightmares for a couple of weeks.
"Skin cream is made from people! ITS MADE OF PEOPLE!!!"
Anyone still think that private industry will do the right thing if it's unregulated?
My fellow Americans, in order to reduce the cost of the Affordable Health Care program, I have authorized FDA, FTA, and Federal Healthcare Agency to automatically donate body parts of deceased patients who received medical care from Medicare, Mediaid, and AFC program.
These Federal agencies will establish a Professional Panel to determine eligible donors, inventory needs, and allocation priority. In this manner, we can all benefit from the lower health care cost and subsequent tax reduction.
Those who choose not to participate in this Federal program are allowed to do so, so long as they pay an extra tax, not a penalty.
I've got toenails for sale!
WallStFatCat....haha, good post, I can see that happening.
It amazes me that just because it's an "industry standard" that that makes it alright. I'd hate the thought that my heart may end up in Dick Cheneys chest.
For my dental implants, my oral surgeon told me that I'd be getting sanitized "bovine bone" (from cows) to build up my jawbone. Then while I was being given the anesthesia shots, he said that no, he thought the bone graft was cadaver bone.
So even if you ask (and everyone should ask their doctors/surgeons/dentists what's going in their bodies), you might get ambiguous answers not because they're trying to deceive you, but because they're just not sure where parts are coming from.
So maybe now I'm part-Ukrainian. Spasibo!
Why is anyone surprised? You live in USA, and refuse to think that there actually is a much higher standard other places, so suck it up.
It is incredible that the media have managed to control and completely not inform the public about anything that is not "approved agenda", like the former Soviet Union.--Possibly that is why the Republican news paper wrappers are red!
Anything for MONEY !!!
While this sounds horrible, remember these tissues are going into implants and other life saving / altering procedures. Burn victims / ect.
What I find reprehensible is the treatment of the material and the false methods used to acquire them cheaply. If someone signs (during their life) or their relatives agree (after their dead) to donate parts of their body, that's all good. Just don't have people lying and stealing them, that's abhorrent.
It's enough to make you rip up and burn your donor card.But when I'm gone from this earth, I hope they do use any and all of the leftover flesh for the betterment of whoever might need it, as I certainly won't have any use for it.
I had cadaver bone used in a spinal fusion several years ago. I accepted assurances that the material had been properly screened and was safe, now I am not sure that anyone can really make that guarantee. I have not had any problems from the bone graft that was used, so I guess it was OK, but who knows how long it might take for certain problems to show up. I have nothing against this practice in theory, but they need to put in place far more oversight to ensure the safety of the products the same way they ensure the safety of transplant organs. To leave this to industry standards and self regulation is just not acceptable, it puts far too many people at risk. When you think that one unscrupulous supplier using one infected body for material could end up infecting hundreds of people you start to realize the full scope of the danger. Something must be done to improve the safety of these materials and it must be done quickly, before we have a major disaster on our hands.
This is one of the most disturbing article I've read in a long time. Is nothing sacred? I was so angry at our own FDA or who ever is supposed to be controlling or monitoring this type of thing. If food poisoning broke out from tainted beef, you can bet they would know exactly where or which country it came from. It makes me question my donor status and if I want someone getting rich off of my corpse. Furthermore, you should probably update your relationship with your physician to make sure you are not getting tissue anything in your body, because it clearly can be from anywhere or anyone and probably not tested. Wow!
What this article does not mention is the brisk trade in foreskin tissue purloined from infants whose parents are encouraged to permit a non-medically indicated circumcision but who are not told that the tissue will end up being used for profit by others. This is a real scandal in the U.S. All one has to do is to use Google and you will find products made from infant foreskins for sale on the internet. Shameful.
I recently looked that up because someone else mentioned it. I was shocked! That a baby's foreskin will be sold by the hospital for profit should CLEARLY be disclosed to the parents prior to circumcision. Just goes to show how misguided our medical system has become.
I hope that my foreskin was used to reconsruct a nipple on a woman with large breasts that likes to play with them.
Now that's thinking with your head, Pan.
Sorry pan, but they're usually used to make anti-wrinkle creams.
Don't you think you or your parents should have been compensated for your foreskin? A U.S. Treasury Savings Bond, a year's tuition in college? After all, those anti-wrinkle creams make big money.
Absolutely true. While pregnant with my first child 17 years ago my OB told us about wonderful work a biomed company was doing with human foreskins in helping burn patients live normal lives. Sounds great, right? Little did I know the OB himself was a shareholder and ended up doing the circumcision himself and pocketed quite a bit of cash. SCAM.
Tissue that is going to be discarded but could be used for valid medical reasons sounds OK to me unless you want to save the thing in a pickle jar yourself............
Artificial skin derived from foreskin tissue and used for burn patients and patients with necrotic skin infections is a valid medical use it seems to me and certainly extremely important to those patients and possibly to each of us someday.....this is from tissue that would otherwise be thrown away instead of used to save lives.
Ron, but way unethical when you don't disclose that you have a financial interest in the company and are getting financially compensated for it.
Make wallets out of them. They'll be in high demand, because if you stroke them the right way they turn into a briefcase.
Denver I concede that is freakin funny. Have a great day USA.
i was think'n they could use them for eyelids...but no body wants to hear that cockeyed story...O-o...
Wow plain bob blew coffee through my nose on that one, way to go.
Wait, I have a picuture in my mind of coffee and snorting .............. and that is just as funny as the cockeyed story! What a bunch of wags we have today.
If the hospitals are cashing in on this they should at least give the unknowing body part donor a reduction in the crazy rates they charge.
"You want $10-grand for the birth? Yeah, fine, but I'm going to need $7-large back for my son's foreskin. Thought you'd just rob the family jewels while we were freaked out about the newborn, did ya?"
Not sure how I feel about this. On one hand, compensation should be granted to the parents if others stand to make considerable profit. On the other hand, we would likely find many more Little Johnnies running around with missing parts of their anatomy so Mom & Pop could pocket a few hundred dollars. Seems this is a very prickly issue.
I've never heard of such a thing. It sounds pretty horid. I can't imagine the feeling someone would have finding out they got a recycled body part implanted into them but if you think about it, it makes sense. There are some things science cannot duplicate YET. So, where else would that certain part come from? It's still kind of freaky thinking about it though.
@rfaber9
They find out donor tissues will be used long before the surgery takes place.
As long as things were on the up and up, I have no problem whatsoever with my body being used for something when i'm dead. At the least, fish food!
I agree it sounds terrible. I would like to know exactly what they are putting in my body if this were to happen to me. And I would not approve to have one of my family members body to get abused that way even if they are already dead. And if these companies think it is so ok to just take these body parts then why all the lies and why forge signatures. This is disgusting to profit on such things. And so disrespectful to these families loved ones bodies. Tearing them apart practically like scavengers!!! FREAKS!!! Nothing about this sounds like it is for helping modern science, just GREED!!!
yeah, shi* happens. get over it.
Immature
You had to know this was around, there was a movie made about 15 years ago, The Harvest, it was about people stealing body organs but they were drugging people and removing their kidneys, etc. I watched another movie about illegal immigrants selling their own body parts to have enough money to have false documentation made for them in other countries. Don't think with the morals the world has now that this does'nt happen alot. Nothing suprises me anymore, absolutely nothing.
Hey scir910n here is an idea lets take your mom, dad, sister, brother, boyfriend and chop them up and send their body parts to different parts of the world. I wonder if you would say shi* happens then douchebag
Does nobody know the story of Henrietta Lacks? AKA HeLa? Why this is a surprise to anybody is scary. Read up on it.
http:// www. smithsonian mag.com/science-nature/Henrietta-Lacks-Immortal-Cells.html
I'll bring a bus, how about you get under it.
The "morals the world has now" are no different than the morals the world has ever had.
Medical schools in the 19th century bought cadavers for dissecting from grave robbers.
Nothing new.
Tina, you are right, but it was clearly against the law and those caught punished. Seems there's no laws or punishment for those in "free enterprise" today.
As a dumb but relevant perspective, what if every cow and chicken on earth had the wherewithal to bury or cremate themselves when they die? Why should humans waste our bodies when we die? If you can, respectfully, be used for science or medicine....do it!
We're all made of the same degrading crap.
Why are these kinds of things seemingly always associated with a 'facility' in Germany?
Hitler is still alive??? If humans are no longer living, why not use the body parts for use by those still living?
Hitler is still alive??? If humans are no longer living, why not use the body parts for use by those still living?
Why not? Because in the context of this story, families of the deceased don't know that body parts of their loved ones have been "harvested", and recipients of these organs, etc. don't know that they came from dead people. That's why not.
Nikolaus20: "Because in the context of this story, families of the deceased don't know that body parts of their loved ones have been "harvested", and recipients of these organs, etc. don't know that they came from dead people.
Replace "harvested" with "stolen".
Human recycling is very profitable and has always been a way of funding politics - dirty little secret, hugh?
I don't dispute you, but I'd love to see some documentation on that. Well all know politicians given enough money simply turn their heads the other way.
Let's start another media driven over-reaction sensation on a subject that has saved many lives and cured many people.
I think the problem may be that if someone donates, or has their body donated, and a company takes that donation and turns around and makes a profit on it.
The problem is that these abuses will lead to people removing themselves from the organ and tissue donation registry.
Human tissue transplantation HAS saved many lives.
The issue here is that no consent by the family is involved and the safety of the tissue is not guaranteed.
Does it really matter once you're dead? You will rot in the ground and your family will visit you a bunch in the first 5 years, then after that, they'll get too busy to visit a stone. Its just a vessel. Give me to the body farm once I croak, cut me up and test me for whatever you want. I don't really care, I'll be dead!
No, the biggest problem is that they aren't tracking the parts, and there is no testing for disease. Like the article and video said, many of these parts are transplanted and people don't even KNOW they are receiving human tissue. As is typical of greedy people, the barest effort is made for the biggest profit.
@Some Guy-5289621
Yeah, don't you just hate it when people choose not to work for free?
FYI, the regulations don't allow people to be compensated for donating. Everyone else makes money of the practice. Allow families to be compensated for their "gift", more people would choose to donate and these companies wouldn't have to scrounge up "parts" from places like this.
Damn that word "profit", no one should ever make a profit, and the world would be such a better place to live for it. WTH, why don't we just eliminate all the inventions of the past two hundred years, and go back to living like the third world countries live now. Practically ever damn thing we use to get through the day was put there due to the profit motive, and so many posters rant about the very reason they have a roof over their heads, their bellies full.
And health insurance companies being for-profit haven't hurt the US's healthcare industry at all, huh?
Profit isn't always a bad thing, but it isn't always a good thing, either.
So you wish the government to apply your health care? The insurance companies are just like all companies, they make a profit or they aren't in business long. People from all over the world come to the US for serious procedures. Would you want the same people that screwed up SS and the mortgage business handling your healthcare also?
So, Dasvet... let's say you get critically injured, but have insurance. Let's say your insurance company has figured out that there's a lot of money to be made off "slightly used" organs, but not too many questions asked about where they come from. Boy, it sure would be a shame if the surgery to fix you was really expensive, and so outside your "plan." Reeeeaaaaal shame. Real shame....
This article almost made me vomit.
I'll take stem cell research over this.
This is such old news as I know it goes back to at least 1969 when we were using cadaver skin grafts for burned Viet Nam vets. No one ever asked where it cam from just arrived in neat little jars. The pieces were run through an expander machine then stretched and placed over areas that had had the skin burned right off. It worked and saved the lives of so many veterans.
William, surely to God, there was no evil profit motive involved. Let people die just to satisfy those who think profit is a curse word. I think we are living the USSR, sounds like it.
Wow, I'm all for donation, but even I was surprised.
Hysteria and all that aside, maybe if people weren't so selfish this would not be so horrifying. So many have no problem at all taking but will never consider donating. Instead they stick the "left overs" in the ground and come and cry every weekend while someone else who is dying suffers and then dies because there are just no help. Donate everything you can to save the lives of thousands and make it legal and worthwhile and articles like this won't be written because places like this will not be in existence.
I have no objection to my "leftovers" being used. I would object to them being used to make a profit.
The only ones that truely suffer are the poor whom are more profitable dead than alive
Eliminate all profits. See for yourself how that would work out, by re-electing the communist Obama again.
Alright, Meezermom, let one of your loved ones get their body parts "harvested" without the family's consent or knowledge, and then tell me how "giving" you are feeling when he/she doesn't have any eyeballs in the casket.
My uncle, who was one of the few blacks in his medical school class, told me about how the class was given a cadaver to study, that happened to be black, and how the white students played jump rope with the intestines. Are you familiar with the Henrietta Lacks story? Don't assume that just because a person doesn't want to donate, that they are being selfish. It could just be that science and medicine don't have a good track record for treating tissues taken from, or the bodies of their people with respect.
Nice, Dasvet. So there's no grey area for you between "unregulated selling of organs for profit" and "anti-capitalist commie pinko sympathizers!"? Jesus. No wonder we can't get anything accomplished in government here anymore.
The family of Henrietta Lacks is STILL struggling with her tissues being used by scientists the world over and she passed in 1951.
Wow! The human species is "literally" a cash cow!
This has also provided a new motive for murder. Next time you see someone looking at you, watch out. He may be sizing you up, estimating how much money he might be able to get for selling your body parts.
As if humans need a new motive for murder.
They don't need a new motive for murder, but the transplanting of human organs has given them one. Human organs sell for a lot of money (like $450,000 for a liver) and humans love money. That's why a black market has grown up around the trafficking of human body parts. It's really creepy.
I understand and realize that many find this practice quite gruesome and disrespectful of a deceased person's remains. However lest we forget, once the person has passed away their spirit, soul, or what ever one chooses to call it has departed. What remains is nothing more than a container similar to the empty hull of certain beetles stuck to the side of a tree once it has molted and moved on to its next life.
For us to simply discard that like so much trash by burying or cremating it is actually more disrespectful than "harvesting" usable parts from such remains. In our misguided sense of love, honor, and respect, we literally say that your physical body is not worthy to continue to be useful in life once your ethereal personage departs. In reality it is almost a form of honoring that person's past existence by using parts of their carcasses to help others to live or have a quality of life.
I am a registered 'donor' and am proud of it. I sincerely hope that any useable parts from my physical remains can be salvaged and put to good use once I pass from this life. What ever is left is to be cremated and interred with my late wife. We humans tend to be a very "symbolic" species and as such often do very irrational things. Funereal services are really very irrational and pointless and only serve the living in my opinion.
We have the knowledge, the means, and the intelligence to make such decisions but unfortunately we cannot get past the emotional aspect of losing a loved one. Keep a lock of hair or some other suitable memento but let the useful parts be recycled in the name of life and as an honorarium for your existence.
I totally agree with everything you said.
I don't believe the issue here is that it is being done, but the way in which it is being done.
Here here shepherd0886! The Victorians had a huge market in mourning brooches, complete with hair from the departed loved one, often in intricate patterns. Maybe we should bring those back. Unfortunately, people are so squeamish about death that they close their eyes to it, yet read the Riot Act whenever their "rights" are infringed on by a big bad medical company that's trying to save others.
So what they make a profit? That kid with leukimia is better now because of their initiative to do what others so foolishly turn their head to.
Of course, funerals serve the living - that's who they are for. It's a time to grieve, remember, and process the beloved person who has died. Funerals are not irrational, but a necessary and important part of remembering and moving on for those still living.
I think it is valuable, even noble, to become an organ donor. However, it is totally disgusting how this industry has become another race to make money. The disregard for families by lying about their loved one and what has been done to the body is appalling. Equally despicable is the disregard for the recipient's safety by lack of screening for disease and unsanitary handling practices.
You missed the point of this article, Buster.
I think the issue is people are left with the vision that their heart, lungs or kidneys are being donated to a person in need. This 'vision' is allowed to keep the masses donating. The article discusses the use of remains that were not authorized by the family or the donor. Perhaps you should read the article before you comment in your pacifistic way. If people knew the means by which their organs and tissues were being handled or where they were coming from, this industry would become a little less palatable. Let's also throw in the FDA, practically the most worthless institution of our federal government, and give this bungling agency the power to oversee it. The cherry on top if the amount of profit that never goes to the person's estate which by all legal means still exists even if their 'etheral personage' is no more. Hospitals are insidious organizations driven by noting more than profit. And they are willing to pursue that goal by any means, however unsavory, necessary.
Well if people were more open with organ and tissue donation, this wouldn't be a problem. There would probably be better testing and screening. But since families start crying about "unfair this" or "unfair that" or whatever else it is that people cry about, there are going to be shady practices. But the fact that so many people are surprised or even shocked by this trade is even more disturbing than the actual article. How long has grave robbing been around?
There is no law on the trade or selling of tissue, however, organizations have tried to rope it in ever since HeLa (Seriously, read up on her) but it's a difficult battle. Once you die, your cells and tissue are considered waste and may be used how doctors see fit.
Don't like it? Get on your soapbox or change.org and try to fix a problem thats been going on since the 30's.
I agree with you completely we have no use for our bodies once we are dead. However I do have a problem with them using my donation for profit. That is the part I find utterly disgusting.
Totally agree with you sheperdo. What I don't agree with is all these illegal operations making money off this. Legalize this industry and regulate it. Let the families make some money from the sale of their loved ones tissue, not some black market operation! The $$ they'd receive would go a long way in covering funeral expenses and in helping to ease their grief.
Samurai, without profit, there would be no organ transplants. It is inane to belittle profit, when it is the source of this country's economy. People will not work for nothing, since most of us have obligations to pay. Get off the silly diatribe about the evils of profit, it is yours and my children's lifeblood.
lolol the fact that people think anything from the eastern European trade is going to be legitimate is hilarious in and of itself. One of the most corrupt places on Earth and you think that some news story is going to all of a sudden make them change their ways?
To 50sBaby I don't think that I missed the point of the article at all. It clearly stated that in most cases an honest effort is made to make certain that reused tissue is clean, safe, and disease free. As for funerals I have no problems with showing respect for and honoring the memory of a deceased loved one. It could be very easy (and a lot less costly I might add) to simply keep the corpse refrigerated during the showing to eliminate decomposition then once the service is complete disect and harvest as need be prior to final disposition. Everyone is happy and someone somewhere gets to live or have a better quality of life.
My point is that what we do for the most part now is wasteful and actually disrespectful of the dead person. I am usually very moved by the parents of young people who they lose to accidents or some such who find great joy in donating parts of their child's body to help someone else. They actually see it as a memorial to that child's life. Now that is being a true and caring human being with worthy values in my opinion. Oh and BTW I am a 40s baby and am getting close to my final days but when my time comes I sincerely hope that someone is able to benefit from my passing.
The organ donor process is all well and good. I am an organ donor and will gladly give viable body parts to a person in need when I pass. What is sickening is the process it takes. People are donating their bodies without consent, policies are not being followed to ensure safety and security.
What would you do if you needed a tissue donation or any type or organ donation and then found you had hepatitis, or AIDS or another incurable disease and found out it was because the 'donated' tissue wasn't tested correctly?
I would rather cultivate my own skin and other tissues, while I am living and enjoy the benefits while I can, rather then somebody have it after my death and profit from it. I vote for STEM CELL RESEARCH, and for biological techniques to grow your own tissues, and have a part in the profits.
That's it. I'm removing my name from any donor list.
Unfortunately it does not matter if you are on the donor list. According to the article signatures were forged and the body parts were removed and sold to other ccompanies without the family's consent.
I have already signed a card donating my body to science, but I've always wondered what they do with your remains when they're done with them? hmmm
Jersey, and you SIGNED the donor card without a clue? Maybe science will contest your donation.
Yes we as a species have sunk to a lower level. I dont mind if the harvesting is done with permission from the family of the departed, but to take it with out that permission is another form of canabalism. This time for profit. It puts these monsters into the same catagory of what the NAZI'S did to their victoms during WWII.
These companies who do it should be investigated to the fullest. However I dont see any Government who will do it.
Makes me wonder why we are considered an intellegent species. Lets hope that a natural disaster will happen at the end of this year and wipe out these kind of predators and their pundits.
IMHO anyone dealing in this trade should be taken outside and shot. No trial, No human rights, no lawyer - just executed with the video posted on the internet as a warning to all that this is what will happen to all who participate.
"Soylent Green is people!"
Great Day in the Mornin ...........what in the hell kinda insanity is THIS? Sweet Jesus, people have LOST THEIR GREEDY MINDS!!!
These "Free for FEE" operations are disguised as nonprofit organizations and often such human chop-shops are located near medical schools where demand exists for human cadaver/parts for medical student-training purposes. These are also used by medical tool manufacturers for surgery and other medical procedure ...seminars in which specialists are trained in use of the high ticket tools/procedures on site. Frequently the only training in advance of a live performance on a patient is obtained by access to cadaver/parts. One such burgeoning nonprofit organization, Life Point, is located near the Medical University of SC and provides the bulk of human tissues/organs/torsos used for training purposes at the local medical school. At this location, human cadavers are dis-assembled by teams of cutters; parts are neatly shrink wrapped and tagged and placed on carts for warehousing in coolers. During breaks from the labor of chopping corpses, the technicians (often medical school trained) resort outside for a quick smoke break. Many of these are lovely women capable and proud of wielding a tissue cutter to dissect rows of waiting male cadavers. Many frequent local popular singles bars and restaurants along the Grand Strand of the South Carolina coast.
Scary stuff. Kinda like the movie "The Island" but worse!
this is the world we live in today...so sad!
It is not new: it has always gone on.
You just weren't aware of it.
where is romney this sounds like his kind of business. giving jobs to the little people and getting some use out of them when they are no longer worth employing. just move the retirement process along and save some social net costs, business doesnt need any regulation
Ok BHO eats puppies, kittens, and walnuts and distributed pot, cocaine, and alcohol to minors - what's your point?
Dear brain dead, Romney worked for Bain 20 Years ago. Look at your PIG Obama, His GE Corporate, JOBS CZAR has moved more jobs offshore in the past THREE YEARS than GM! And he is still taking on US GOVT LOANS and our TAX DOLLARS.