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Taphophilia (dot) Com...
A repository of morbid curiosities:
Thanatology and Taphophile Issues, Cemetery,
Funeral Industry and Death Related News.
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Guardians of the Soul: Angels and Innocents, Mourners and Saints, Indiana's remarkable cemetery sculpture
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West Springfield Massachusetts: Stories Carved in Stone by Rusty Clark features information on early New England gravestone carvers with more than two hundred photos and illustrations. Please visit the Dog Pond Press website.
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When Corpses Become Mere Commodities |
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Written by DeadGirl
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Wednesday, 11 January 2006 |
WASHINGTON -- The gruesome disclosure of funeral homes secretly carving up corpses and selling the skin, tendons and bones to a New Jersey middleman for distribution to human tissue processors has focused renewed attention on the trade in human body parts.
Medical experts say the ghoulish scandal, now under criminal investigation, is the latest example of a growing and profitable nationwide business in body parts, and sheds light on the gaps in government regulation and the unethical treatment of the dead.
"Bodies and tissues are now becoming commodities, not for the common good but for the money that is generated," said Ronn Wade, director of Maryland's Anatomy Board.
While there are no official figures on revenue, the body-parts industry includes more than 100 tissue banks. Eight of the biggest banks, which procure body parts from donor families and sell the tissue for medical products, generate about $500 million a year in revenue, public records show.
Todd Olson, a professor of anatomy at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, said unscrupulous brokers, in violation of the law, are profiting from the sale of body parts that are in high demand and short supply. He said the participants include companies that collect and sell body parts and human tissues for medical training, for commercial research and for surgical products.
"There are people acquiring, transporting and in some cases dismembering bodies who are functioning in a world without appropriate regulation or oversight," said Olson.
"A lot of people are willing to spend a lot of money without asking questions to obtain these body parts and tissues," he said. "And there is an immense amount of money to be made by people who are able to acquire and process human anatomical materials."
The macabre case in the metropolitan region involves allegations that hundreds of people were dismembered at funeral homes in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Connecticut, and their body parts sold for profit to a Fort Lee tissue bank without the knowledge or consent of the families.
Among the dead was famed British broadcaster Alistair Cooke, the host of PBS's "Masterpiece Theatre."
Law enforcement authorities in Brooklyn say they are looking at the funeral homes and at BioMedical Tissue Services of Fort Lee that resold the human bones, skins and tendons to LifeCell Corp. in Branchburg and to four other tissue processors located in Georgia, Texas and Florida.
These tissue banks later distributed the materials to hospitals and surgeons. LifeCell subsequently discovered irregularities and notified authorities.
The Food and Drug Administration, which is conducting its own inquiry, said that because of the potential lack of proper screening of the tissue donors, some recipients of the tissues may be at "increased risk of infections."
NOT AN ISOLATED INCIDENT
While shocking, the recent case does not stand alone. Other recent examples involving the trafficking in body parts include:
The arrest in 2004 of the director of UCLA's cadaver donation program and another individual on charges they supplied stolen body parts to a middleman who sold them for profit to major private research companies.
The disclosure by Tulane University in the past year that it sold seven cadavers to a distributor who resold them for a sizable profit to the Army for use in a land mine testing. The university expected the cadavers would go to medical schools for research.
The guilty plea in 2003 of California crematory owner for embezzlement and mutilating grave remains after prosecutors charged he removed heads, knees, spines and other parts of 133 bodies without family knowledge and sold them to research companies for more than $400,000.
The firing of the director of the cadaver program at the University of Texas in Galveston after authorities alleged he sold fingernails and toenails to a pharmaceutical company for $4,000, and might have sold other body parts.
A pending criminal probe in Maine to determine whether human brains from the state medical examiners office were improperly sold without family consent to a nonprofit research institute in Maryland. Numerous lawsuits also are pending.
Federal law allows the donation but prohibits the sale of human organs and tissues for transplantation.
There is no prohibition on buying and selling body parts for medical and scientific research, and no federal regulation of brokers of body parts for research.
The law allows organizations and entrepreneurs to charge "reasonable" acquisition and handling fees for processing, storing and transporting of body parts.
Critics say this fee system is subject to wide interpretation of what is reasonable and leads to exploitation by those who seek to engage in profit-taking in an industry that takes in hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
There are several ways to donate cadavers or body parts for science and medicine.
About 10,000 bodies a year are donated to medical schools for teaching and research with no direct federal oversight.
Individuals also can donate organs for transplant purposes, a practice highly regulated by the federal government. In 2004, there were 27,000 organ transplants in the United States, with 20,000 livers, kidneys, hearts, lungs and other organs coming from deceased donors.
Tissue donation for transplant is another widespread practice that must meet federal rules regarding the handling, testing and preparation of the material. Every year, about 1 million tissue transplants are done with tissue supplied by some 25,000 donors -- bones for fracture repair, skin to heal wounds, tendons and ligaments to repair sports injuries.
THE SYSTEM BREAKS DOWN
The tissue bank controls have in the past year been upgraded by the FDA, but the system broke down in the recent New York-New Jersey case.
P. Robert Rigney, chief executive officer of the American Association of Tissue Banks, said the major tissue banks are accredited by his organization to insure they meet high standards regarding family consent, screening and safety, and also are regulated and inspected by the FDA.
He said there may be "entities out there we may not know that are in business," but added he knows of no other instance involving human tissues for transplantation that in any way mirrors what happened in the New York-New Jersey case.
"If the allegations are true, it is unconscionable," he said. "What is alleged in this case is forgery and falsification of records. We are actively examining this scenario to see if there is anything we need to do to tighten up our standards."
Bob Biggins, president of the National Funeral Directors Association, called the recent disclosure "heartbreaking" but "isolated." While state regulations vary for funeral homes and crematories, Biggins said "there is no state that I know of that allows a licensee to procure tissue for sale from a third party without prior consent from the family."
Biggins said states have laws and the industry has strict codes of conduct, but acknowledged there will always be people who will "skirt the regulations to do something immoral and unethical."
Arthur Caplan, director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Bioethics, said there is a lack of oversight regarding who is collecting human tissues and body parts for scientific or medical research, and increased financial incentives for shady individuals and businesses to thrive.
While the problem may only be "fringe players," said Caplan, "there is enough smoke coming out that you start to wonder if there is some kind of fire here."
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Taphophilia?
taphophilia (taf′ō-fil′ē-ă)
ORIGIN:
From the Greek words taphos, meaning "tomb" or "sepulcher" and philia, meaning "attraction or affinity to something, in particular the love or obsession with something"
DEFINITION: 1. An excessive interest in graves and cemeteries. 2. A love or fondness for funerals, graves, and cemeteries. 3. In psychiatry, a morbid attraction to graves and cemeteries
Quote Repository
“'And here, among the English tombs,
In Tuscan ground we lay her,
While the blue Tuscan sky endomes
Our English words of prayer'” Epitaph for Lily Cottrell by E
Shirtless and Sculpted
The Men of Mortuaries 2008 Calendar is now available! All sale proceeds benefit KAMMCARES, a breast cancer foundation.
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