Donors don't realize they are fueling a lucrative business Legal and ethical issues are raised by generating millions of dollars from donated bodies. Some families allege illegal body-part harvesting in the rush to increase supply, profits.

By MARK KATCHES, WILLIAM HEISEL and RONALD CAMPBELL The Orange County Register

American businesses make hundreds of millions of dollars selling products crafted from donated human bodies, even though it is illegal to profit from cadaver parts, an Orange County Register investigation found.

Cadaver skin puffs up the lips of fashion models at $1,050 a shot. Dentists use ground bone about 200,000 times a year to treat their patients. Glossy catalogs advertise 650 products made from body parts.

A single dead body yields raw materials worth tens of thousands of dollars to businesses whose stock is traded on Wall Street and to nonprofit agencies that obtain the parts for them, records and interviews show.

Nowhere in the country are grieving families told that their gifts fuel a fast-growing industry predicted to hit $1 billion within three years. Neither are the millions of Californians who put a pink dot on their driver's licenses indicating their willingness to donate body parts.......

More here:

http://www.ocregister.com/health/body/index.shtml

-- cin (cin@cin.cin), July 09, 2000

Answers

Thanks, Cin, I think. This is definitely my weekend to hear about dead bodies and the uses/abuses thereof.

-- (kb8um8@yahoo.com), July 09, 2000.

Tainted Russian tissue led to U.S. rules INVESTIGATION: Lure of hard cash proved irresistible for impoverished coroners, hospitals. MOSCOW - The collapse of the Russian economy spurred a frenzied trade in human bodies that led directly to U.S. regulation of the human- tissue industry, an investigation by The Orange County Register found.

In Russia in the early 1990s, human body parts were taken and exported without consent.

In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration found body- parts brokers peddling Eastern European tissue from a storefront dental office in Los Angeles and home-based offices in Florida and Detroit. Most of the tissue was poorly documented. Some of it was infected.

Some Russian cadavers made their way to San Diego-based Allograft Technologies Inc., known as the San Diego Regional Tissue Bank. The FDA ordered the bank to recall 834 pieces of human tissue it received from Russia and distributed in 18 states, including California. And while the FDA could not prove any infections were passed to patients from Eastern European tissue, the information the agency uncovered triggered immediate change.

Post-Soviet Russia repeated the fate of many Third World countries in economic turmoil. It turned into a raw materials bonanza, supplying wealthier countries with oil, aluminum and, as it turned out, human body parts. For impoverished Russian coroners and hospitals, the multimillion-dollar international industry crafting expensive medical products out of cadavers dangled a lure they could not resist: money.- ----------------------------------------------------------------------

UGH - infected tissue? Wonder if any was radiation contaminated (chernobyl).

-- cin (cin@cin.cin), July 09, 2000.