We lawyers are familiar with defective products that can cause injury or death. We would tend to think of a manufactured product, such as, an automobile or a chain saw. But, there may be some really spooky defective products that are of concern in the medical field. It is not an artificial hip. In fact, there is nothing artificial about these products at all. Read parts of the story below.
Hundreds of Americans given body parts from looted cadavers
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.
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