(no subject)

[theweaselking]

Don't worry, the doctor told Brian Lykins' parents, as he prepared to use cartilage from a cadaver to fix their son's knee. A million people a year have operations that use tissue from donated dead bodies. The nation's largest tissue bank had supplied this cartilage. It was disinfected and perfectly safe, he assured them. But it wasn't.

Four days after this routine, elective surgery, Lykins—a healthy, 23-year-old student from Minnesota—died of a raging infection.

He died because the cartilage came from a corpse that had sat unrefrigerated for 19 hours—a corpse that had been rejected by two other tissue banks. The cartilage hadn't been adequately treated to kill bacteria.

None of this broke a single federal rule.

Comments

[erynr.livejournal.com]

I read a story like this a few days ago. The book was called "Body Brokers" and it's about the underground body remains trade. Basically the story goes like this one, except that the family did not know that his remains were being used in this manner. He had AIDS during his life so the family never even considered donating his tissue to the medical community for transplants. Long story shirt, tissue from his body was used in transplant procedures, people got sick, some died, etc. This wasn't the only story either. Most of the book was about the body broker trade itself. It was a good book, more than a little disturbing, but it was good.

[leighdb.livejournal.com]

I think they based an episode of Bones on this story.

It's funny, because it sounds like the kind of thing that should totally be an urban legend, and yet, apparently not.

Free wine glasses with every certified stiff

[frith]

I believe I heard this story last week on CBC Radio. IIRC, the corpse was a suicide...

Oh yeah, here it is: "The body from which it was taken was that of a young who had committed suicide. And his body lay in a room until it was found for about 19 hours – and this was enough time to allow this bacteria to grow inside of him. He should not have been a donor because he had been lying unrefrigerated for too long a period of time. But I think the company that bought his body, they were willing to take that chance because there is so much money at stake." Go read the rest of that transcript -- remember Alastair Cooke of Masterpiece Theater? Parts of his corpse was snatched too.

Quote: "The police claim Mastromarino paid the funeral home about $1,000 per cadaver. Each body can yield 50 or more valuable tissue products. In Alastair Cooke’s case, it is known that one company paid $8,000 for just some of Mr. Cooke’s leg bones. A second company may have paid about the same. It’s not surprising that in 5 years of activity, Mastromarino and his team allegedly raked in more than $5 million in sales."