Body part harvesting company sold parts from dead cancer patients, drug users

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http://www.newstarget.com/020109.html

 

 

Body part harvesting company sold parts from dead cancer patients,

drug users for use in surgery recipients

Posted Wednesday, August 23, 2006 by NewsTarget,

 

 

(NewsTarget) The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) ordered a North

Carolina company that harvests human body parts for transplant to

close last week after finding serious violations in the company's

donor-screening and record-keeping practices.

 

The company -- Donor Referral Services -- was ordered to stop its

operations after FDA inspections of the Raleigh-based company in June

revealed doctored records that had allowed former cancer patients and

intravenous drug users to have their organs harvested for transplant.

 

In the case of at least five of the cadavers at the company, paperwork

had been altered on the age and history of the donors. In one case,

the company's owner, Philip Guyette, failed to list that the donor had

died of cancer, and that intravenous drug use had been a factor in the

death. Use of IV drugs increases the risk of HIV/AIDS and hepatitis.

 

Though all of the tissues the company harvested have been recalled,

the FDA says some have already been transplanted. FDA spokesman Paul

Richards was unclear on how many people had received tissue from the

company, and urged patients who had questions to contact their doctors.

 

" Allowing the firm to continue to manufacture would present a danger

to public health by increasing the risk of communicable disease

transmission, " says Margaret O'K. Glavin, associate commissioner of

the FDA's office of regulatory affairs.

 

The Donor Referral Services shutdown comes after the tissue industry

has struggled to recover from its biggest scandal, which involved a

New Jersey company -- Biomedical Tissue Services -- allegedly taking

body parts from corpses without the families' permission.

 

" The organ harvesting industry is shrouded in secrecy, " said Mike

Adams, consumer health advocate, " but the secrets are starting to come

out, and what we're learning is horrifying. The body parts trade is

steeped in unethical and grotesque practices, and it profits from the

trade of human organs of taken from questionable sources under

suspicious circumstances. "

 

Adams has long been an outspoken critic of the profit motive in the

organ donor / organ harvesting industries and warns people to think

twice before becoming an organ donor. " There are even laws on the

books in some countries, " he explains, " that allow surgeons to start

prepping your body for organ harvesting before you've been declared dead. "

 

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