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Mon Nov 16 19:43:19 GMT 2009

http://www.economist.com/world/unitedstates/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14700636&fsrc=rss#

Criminal trade in human body parts

The skin-and-bone business
Oct 22nd 2009
>From The Economist print edition

A gruesome tale from Raleigh

AFTER silencing all-too-appropriate shouts of "butcher!" from the courtroom 
gallery, a federal judge in North Carolina earlier this month sentenced a 
man with the rather grisly job title of "human tissue broker" to eight years 
in prison for selling medically unsuitable bone, tendons and skin for 
transplant. The case has raised concerns about the safety of the American 
tissue donation industry, worth about $1 billion a year.

Philip Guyett, 42, pleaded guilty last March to falsifying records so he 
could sell tissue from corpses that were, according to court documents, 
riddled with cancer or showed signs of intravenous drug use. He was, 
apparently, desperate for cash to save his struggling business.

Corpses are big business. Tissues from a single body can fetch as much as 
$10,000 in America, where every year more than 1.3 million procedures using 
donated tissue are performed. The most common are knee reconstructions, 
spinal surgeries, hip replacements and dental work. Distinct from solid 
organs like hearts, lungs and kidneys, harvested tissues also include 
cartilage, ocular material, arteries and veins.

The recovery and transplantation of organs tends to be highly controlled 
because organs, unlike tissue, have to be a perfect physical match, in good 
shape and handled with extreme care to have any hope of functioning in the 
recipient's body. By contrast, bone can be stored for ages, ground into a 
paste and successfully used in a range of procedures on various people 
without regard to say, blood type. Federal law prohibits the selling of 
organs but not of human tissue.

Although Mr Guyett got his bodies from funeral homes (he paid the directors 
to alert him of new arrivals), more reputable tissue businesses get their 
bodies from hospitals, which tend to keep better records and have better 
preservation facilities. The Food and Drug Administration regulates the 
country's 2,000 human tissue harvesters but its resources permit only a few 
hundred inspections per year. Only a dozen states have their own rules 
regulating the business.

The case is unpleasantly similar to one two years ago involving another 
tissue broker, this one from New Jersey, who also sold ineligibly old or 
diseased tissue including bone from the cancer-ravaged, 95-year-old corpse 
of the British radio journalist Sir Alistair Cooke. Cindy Gordon, a 
spokesman for the non-profit Musculoskeletal Transplant Foundation, fears 
that disgusting cases like these two could put people off donating.

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