A Macabre Theater of Greed

Wired News: A Macabre Theater of Greed

The probe — first reported by the New York Daily News in October — has generated other gruesome stories. In one instance, the corpse of a Queens grandmother that investigators exhumed last month had nearly all the bones removed below the waist and replaced with PCV pipes.

A grand jury in Brooklyn has been hearing evidence against at least a half dozen funeral homes in the borough and against Biomedical Tissue Services that they illegally profited by conspiring to sell stolen body parts. Authorities say indictments could be handed up early next year.

The brewing scandal's reach extends far beyond the New York City area.

In the fall, the FDA ordered a recall of products produced by tissue processors in New Jersey, Florida, Georgia and Texas, all customers of Biomedical Tissue Services. Since the announcement, authorities in Canada have determined that about 300 potentially tainted products were imported there, and used for dental surgery on at least two patients.

Health officials advised physicians that patients who were implanted with the tissue should be tested for HIV, hepatitis and other infectious diseases. The officials said they believed the health hazards were minimal, and no infections have been reported since the FDA warning.

And this from Salon discussion on the high price of human eggs:

The 1994 National Organ Transplant Act explicitly prohibits the sale of human organs. The logic goes something like this: If we let people sell their kidneys on eBay, we turn the human body into a commodity and create a market for body parts. Selling organs would make transplants too expensive for most people, and organs would end up going to the highest bidders, rather than to the most needy. Also, the poor might try to sell their organs to make ends meet -- like the woman who recently tried to sell a kidney to pay the bill for her gall bladder surgery. To put it bluntly, we'd literally be slicing up poor people to get spare parts for the rich. Not to mention the black market that would result