Legacy MattersYou might have missed the story about the stolen bones of Alistair Cooke, you should not miss this story in today's Washington Post: In New York, a Grisly Traffic in Body Parts by Michael Powell and David Segal.
The lead: "Hundreds of very live Americans are walking around with pieces of the wrong dead people inside of them."
A macabre scandal has spread from a body-harvesting lab in New Jersey to hospitals as far away as Florida, Nebraska and Texas as hundreds of people discover that they have received tissue and bone carved from looted corpses, not least the cadaver of Alistair Cooke, the late and erudite host of PBS's "Masterpiece Theatre."
The Brooklyn district attorney and federal Food and Drug Administration inspectors are investigating dozens of funeral homes in New York City and Biomedical Tissue Services Ltd. of Fort Lee, N.J., which is run by a former dentist who, his lawyer acknowledges, abused intravenous pain medications while with patients.
The former dentist came to funeral homes, investigators say, and extracted bone, tendons and skin from corpses without the consent of relatives. Later, Biomedical Tissue Services shipped coolers full of tissue to hospitals for surgeries. A dead body can be worth tens of thousands of dollars when it is dissected for parts.
The scandal raises questions about the safety and proper supervision of a billion-dollar-a-year industry that supplies skin and tissue for 1 million tissue transplants each year. But patients are most confounded by the skin-crawling fact that no one knows from whom the bone and tissue was harvested.
Heather Augustin, 42, lives in southern New Jersey and had two disks in her neck removed last year, supposedly replaced with bone taken from a youngish corpse. Three months later, her surgeon told her that her new neck bone had in fact come from rogue funeral homes, likely from the cadaver of a very old person.
Augustin hasn't slept particularly well since. "You think, 'I'm carrying a bone in my neck from someone who didn't want to get chopped up,' " she said. "I'm, like, in total shock. What am I supposed to do with these thoughts?"
I don't think Alistair Cooke's family has had a good night's sleep since his death. His daughter said she never gave permission for her father to be cut up. Cooke in fact had a "horror of being cut open."
"I am surprised by how upset I am," said Kittredge, who said she favors organ donation. "You wanted to remember your loved one in the fullness of life. But I've lived with the image of his cadaver pressed against my face now for a month.
"You have lives torn asunder, and I hope the people responsible for these desecrations get their comeuppance."
These rogue funeral homes and looters of corpses deserve a lot more than comeuppance. Personally, I vote for eternal damnation.
UPDATE: The FDA has shut down Biomedical Tissue Services Ltd or BTS, the New Jersey company that collected and distributed the tissue samples.
No one has yet been diagnosed with any infectious disease contracted from tissues collected from funeral home cadavers by Biomedical Tissue Services Ltd. of Fort Lee, New Jersey, the FDA said.
But several hospitals recently notified dozens of patients about the risks from the transplanted tissues and offered screening for infectious diseases such as HIV/AIDS, hepatitis, and syphilis.
Violations cited by the FDA against the company included not receiving consent from the donor, while alive, or his or her family, and not properly screening donors for illnesses that might make their tissue ineligible for transplant.