NEW YORK- A macabre scandal in which corpses were plundered for body parts could be even bigger than previously disclosed, with one company alone saying it has distributed thousands of pieces of human tissue that authorities fear could be tainted with disease.
In addition, three other companies have reported quarantining or destroying more than $5 million in tissue from Biomedical Tissue Services — the now-defunct New Jersey supply house at the center of the scandal...
BTS has been accused of collecting body parts without donor consent and selling them for use in transplants performed at hospitals and other medical facilities across the country. The owner of BTS and three others were charged in a scheme that earned them millions of dollars. All four have pleaded not guilty.
BTS supplied bone, skin and tendons to various processors, who in turn provided them to distributors. Those companies are not accused of any wrongdoing.
Minneapolis-based distributor Medtronic Inc. reported that at least 8,000 pieces that came from BTS were implanted, and others are being recalled, according to documents filed January in a federal lawsuit in Ohio.
The number was revealed in a question-and-answer form the company sent to surgeons around the country in November 2005 shortly after it was notified that the tissue had dubious origins...
The FDA will not say whether any patients have ailments that might be linked with suspect tissue. The FDA has also refused to reveal how many people received BTS tissue...
Free enterprise, you know.
Chop shops seem all the rage these days, and victims seem to come from all over and all lifestyles.
Although the dead seem the easiest victims, one has to wonder how many people and especially teenagers (healthy parts) who disappear meet this fate.
Not to mention the contribution of human traffic, which next to drugs is the most lucrative international criminal activity. Or it was in 1999 anyway.
Current statistics are harder to find.
It seems the Bush administration has removed this from the Department of Justice website priorities.
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