WASHINGTON - A leading medical firm has quietly recalled hundreds of human tissue products destined for transplants around the nation that were supplied by a North Carolina body parts broker believed to have a tainted history.
The broker used an unsterile embalming room to carve up dozens of corpses to procure tissue, a Raleigh funeral home director said Tuesday. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration shut down the body broker on Friday, but refuses to say how many people may have received potentially risky tissue.
It is the second scandal in less than a year in the booming tissue transplant industry. Cadaver tissue is used in more than a million transplants each year in such routine operations as back surgery and knee repairs. While such donated tissue does tremendous good, it is also little regulated, a three-month Associated Press investigation found earlier this year.
Improperly processed or poorly tested tissue can lead to infections like hepatitis or AIDS or even death. Last year a scandal unfolded around Biomedical Tissue Services, a New Jersey company accused of using stolen bodies and of shipping nearly 20,000 potentially tainted body parts.
Federal authorities kept the North Carolina episode quiet until late last Friday, when the FDA shut down Donor Referral Services of Raleigh, N.C. The FDA said the company, run by Philip Guyett, had "serious deficiencies" in its processing, donor screening and record-keeping. The government accused him of altering records to overlook such problems as cancer or drug use by the deceased donor.
But on July 6, AlloSource of Centennial, Colo., began its own recall of about 300 Guyett-provided transplant parts that went to a company it had acquired, an AlloSource spokeswoman said Tuesday.
Guyett, 38, hung up on a reporter trying to reach him for comment on Friday.
The FDA won't say how many potentially tainted body parts might have made it to hospitals for transplant. But two companies doing business with Guyett told The Associated Press Tuesday that they know of at least 60 bodies cut up and at least 300 body parts that were recalled. And those firms were not the only business associates that Guyett had, they said...
My mother had ghouls calling her up when my father died trying to get "skin grafts for burn patients" from him even though he wasn't an organ donor and had, among other problems, malignant melanoma.
She hung up on the bastards after trying to explain to them he had skin cancer as well as emphysema and heart problems.
They still badgered her to sign over body parts, because she's old and (they thought) alone.
On the other hand, I enjoy hanging up on any ghouls or reptilicans.
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