| The Nasty Side of Organ Transplanting Second Edition Norm Barber Copyright Chapter 9 Body Parts and Business Body Parts and Products Organ transplant interests complain that vital organ donations haven’t risen for the past ten years. This is true. Prospective customers aren’t shooting or knifing each other as in the good old days. Car seat belts and breath testing have dented the flow of brain-injured candidates. Better neurosurgery for stroke victims is reducing this other prime source of donors. The Hidden Industry But there is a hidden industry for which statistics aren’t publicly presented and the donation agencies feign surprise and anger when asked about it. This is the market for completely dead donors whose hearts and everything else has stopped. They are called cardiac dead donors. They are really dead. Their vital organs aren’t always used, often due to deterioration during the dying process, but their bodies still provide raw material for surgical activities ranging from heart valve replacements to cosmetic surgery. The American body parts processing industry is far more advanced than the Australian but demand for our cosmetic and surgical techniques is on par with the American. This means our industry is fed by imported parts and products harvested from dead Americans. Our medical industry, through demand for cadaver products, encourages Americans to aggressively harvest their own citizens’ bodies. In that way Australian users of imported body parts are also responsible for what Americans do. Compulsory Harvest Requests In 1998 Clinton Administration legislation forced United States hospitals that receive Medicare payments to pressure relatives of the deceased to sign voluntary harvesting consent forms. This increased cardiac dead harvesting in the United States 172% over five years to 20,000 bodies annually or three and a half times the number of vital organ donors. 42 Worth More Dead Than Alive This isn’t a joke. The power of the American transplant industry to determine government legislation hinges on the fact that a single donor body can provide the raw material to generate products selling for US$220,000 wholesale.43 When adding surgical fitting costs it can reach one million dollars. If the donor also supplied vital organs the amount generated by one body is two million dollars. Most of us are worth much more dead than alive. The Gift of Life more resembles a market commodity and a factor motivating aggressive transplant coordinators to help meet market demand for dead bodies guarded by relatives who don’t want their next of kin to be harvested. There is a higher demand than supply and this creates a hungry market. This explains why transplant interests so aggressively lobby governments, manipulate public opinion and fund donor promotion registries.44 Shortage of Skin for Burns but Plenty for Cosmetic Surgery Harvested cadaver skin is used to cover holes left by tumours and make slings to support bladders of those with urinary incontinence thus alleviating the need for adult nappies. More skin comes from the obese and less from midgets and thin people. In the United States skin from one donor fetches $3600 if sold to hospitals to treat burns victims. Burns victims need layers of donated skin to protect the exposed and injured parts of their body from infections and to facilitate replacement of their own skin over the injured area. Twenty thousand cardiac dead donors annually provide plentiful quantities of skin for medical purposes, but there is a continuous shortage. But in a free market society most of the donated skin is sold. Non-profit body harvesting Foundations receive the bodies for free then pass them on to cosmetic products companies for a token price. The processed skin for burns victims worth $3600 is transformed into cosmetic surgery products which eventually sell for $36,000 wholesale.45 This artificial shortage means that burns victims don’t get the cadaver skin. Instead their relatives undergo painful procedures with full anaesthetic where surgeons strip skin from their living bodies to be placed on their relatives’ injuries while donated skin, painlessly removed from dead bodies, goes for cosmetic surgery. Thick Frankenstein Penis’ LifeCell Corporation, using donated cadaver skin, produces Alloderm, a plastic surgery product used to reconstruct eyelids for older women who want to look younger and sexier. Other uses include reducing or enlarging breast size and thickening penises. Have you ever wondered how movie stars or aging TV newsreaders have so few wrinkles or the women have such big, red pouting lips? Collagenesis, Incorporated of Massachusetts, uses cadaver skin to make an injectable gel called Dermalogen. Cosmetic surgeons will, for $1000 a shot, inject Dermalogen into the women to puff up their skin to remove wrinkles and laugh lines or fatten their lips. The benefit of Dermalogen is that the body doesn’t break it down so repair jobs are less frequently needed. The drawback is with the permanency of injected cadaver skin. Ghastly mistakes are hard to fix.46 Alloderm and Dermalogen compete with similar products such as one cultured from the bugs living in the puffy fluid of arthritis sufferers. The “stuff” is injected into a person’s (usually a woman) face to puff it up like arthritic fingers thus taking away the wrinkles. The puffy “stuff” is absorbed by the body and must be repeated at high expense every six to twelve months. Similarly, cowhides are made into a collagen and pumped into wrinkly faces. Another product made from botulism paralyses facial muscles to stop natural facial movements that cause wrinkles. Ever admired the thighs of scantily clad move stars? Fascia Biosystems of Beverly Hills, California sell a trademark thigh tissue to cosmetic surgeons. Fascia lata is the connective tissue holding thigh muscles together. Fascia is transplanted from the corpse to the movie star which may explain those incredibly firm and tight bodies. Football and sports heroes don’t miss out on the cannibal trade either. Ten of a corpse’s tendons bring $20,000 (the Achilles and patella come with bone still attached). Knee cartilage is worth $14,000. When an Australian Football League player breaks a tendon or wrecks a knee he is off to the morgue for spare parts. A humerus fetches $28,000. Need a varicose vein job? Saphenous and Femoral veins, used for varicose vein and blood vessel reconstruction, sell for $14,000. Corneas, the clear part of the eye that covers the coloured part, fetch $2400 a pair. Heart valves are $7000 each from a heart costing Cryolife or other valve collectors less than $1000 from the non-profit Foundation, which they have usually set up as a front to obtain cheap or free corpses 47 Bones and the Ladies Powder Room We may think the blood and bone people dealing in human body parts are from a Jeffrey Dahmer style murder trial, but it is technology and market demand that has created the impetus for this industry. The market is hungry so the body parts industry relentlessly pressures governments for increased access to corpses. The human body has 206 separate bones most of which will fetch a reasonable price, but it is at the processed, ready-to-transplant stage where the profits are to be made. Bones are deep-frozen or freeze dried at 92 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. This allows storage of five years and helps reduce rejection. The first stages of bone harvesting is so simple that some American doctors take cadavers home and remove the bones in their garages. Young donors with strong vibrant bones bring high prices while the porous bones of older woman are ground up for dental dust which gives a new twist to the term "ladies powder room". Harvesters want every human bone which indicates the challenge to morticians at open casket funerals and the delight of plastic medical pipe suppliers. Dental Dust and Bone Putty Small carpentry shops using only human bones grind out specially manufactured parts for hospital and dental surgeries. These include bone chips (looking like grated parmesan cheese), bone paste, screws made from bones, wedges, spears, blocks and a large range of custom made parts used to reconstruct, patch or replace the injuries suffered by living humans. Osteotech, Inc makes a bone putty costing US$853 for two teaspoons that is used to patch up small breaks. Larger cracks are mended using a chip and putty blend. Demineralised human bone is ground into "dental dust" and used to improve healing after tooth extractions, spinal fusions and minor surgery. The "dust" is made by removing the 70% mineral content from bone leaving 30% collagen and non-collagenous proteins. A dentist uses it after grinding out rotting teeth and jawbone. Dental dust is sprayed onto the exposed healthy bone to increase the healing rate. It is also used when transplanting bone material from a corpse to a living patient. It helps to fuse the two bones together. It also fuses worn vertebrae and other joint bones to stop movement and associated pain. Dental dust’s popularity hasn’t suffered despite a problem with it transferring HIV-AIDS. This problem has reportedly been solved. Business Links to Non-profit Foundations and Government Enterprises One might wonder where business, donation agencies and hospitals merge in this creeping neo-cannibalism. Government hospitals are often reluctant players. Most doctors and nurses are dedicated to the Hippocratic ideal not to harm patients yet the act of cutting out a healthy (and it must be healthy) beating heart from an injured patient isn’t exactly First Aid. Some wish organ harvesting had never been developed. The organ procurement businesses have infiltrated their influence into medical establishments and may be pressuring next of kin within three or four hours of the patient being diagnosed brain dead – or even before this point. This is usually before the rest of their family have reached the hospital or even been told of the injury. The patient can even be harvested before some nearby relatives learn of the illness or injury. Hospital staff may avoid skin and bone harvesting and a team from the euphemistically entitled Tissue Bank will arrive to dismantle the corpse. American Tissue Banks operate like the non-profit Musculoskeletal Foundation. It is the largest body procurer in the U.S.A. theoretically operating as a benevolent society but actually a front organisation specifically set-up in 1987 by Osteotech, Incorporated, to obtain bodies free of charge, then transfer them for a tiny price to Osteotech, who begin the process of turning each body into $220,000 worth of products. Virtually every American body procuring Benevolent Foundation is a secret agent for a private company.48 The Musculoskeletal Transplant Foundation of the U.S.A. produces a catalogue listing 650 body parts products. Australians use more subterfuge and hide their body parts businesses within government science and educational institutions, but the relationships are the same. One section of the institution acts as a non-profit organisation that lures in the donated corpses then passes them to a business ally, which is another section of the institution. The Donor Tissue Bank of Victoria discreetly operates as a business within Monash University and the South Australian Tissue Bank operates under cover of the Institute of Medical and Veterinary Science in Adelaide. The New South Wales Bone Bank hides out at St George Hospital in Kogarah. Another Australian characteristic is that body parts are often removed under the guise of medical post-mortems unlike in the United States where relatives are directly approached to donate the body for parts and materials. The common feature of both types of organisations in the United States and Australia is that participants at every level profit financially, except donors and heirs. The intractiveness of our predicament is that we have a medical industry on which over 500 surgical procedures depend on human body parts and products. National governments fund a medical industry that depends on the consumption of its injured, dying and dead humans. While this method of medicine remains funded by taxes and government protection our wellbeing will remain dependent on a form of cannibalism that we euphemistically call “body parts recycling” or the “gift of life”. |