Famed forensic anthropologist Dr. William Bass, whose work at the University of Tennessee and its Body Farm is one of the world’s leading experts on what happens to the dead. Bass says that the practice of illegal tissue harvesting is very real and very frightening.

Prompted by an ongoing investigation into a ring that allegedly stole body parts of more than 1,000 corpses, the New Jersey state Senate approved a bill yesterday making it a first-degree crime to trade in human remains against the wishes of the deceased.
No charges have been filed in New Jersey against Mastromarino, who has denied any wrongdoing in the case brought by the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office. He contends funeral parlor directors were responsible for getting consent for body-part donations.
The stolen body parts sold to five commercial tissue processors for use in thousands of transplant patients from Vermont to California, without obtaining families’ permission or testing for disease.

Indianapolis businessman Robert Nelms owns Memory Gardens. He operates more than a dozen funeral homes. Four of them are in Indiana, including Forest Lawn in Greenwood.
But it’s the New York funeral home he bought in late 2003 that made national headlines. Nelms said that he had no prior knowledge about the bone and tissue harvesting taking place in the Daniel George and Sons Funeral home in the quiet working class Bensonhurst neighborhood in Brooklyn.

You’ve heard about spinach and toys and cars being recalled but human tissue? Every year there are approximately one and a half million new surgical procedures known as allografts. An allograft is surgical transfers of bone, skin, tendons, teeth in which tissues from cadavers are transplanted into patients.
Recently, the New Jersey tissue company known as Biomedical Tissue Services was criminally indicted for illegally harvesting human tissue from corpses. As a result, patients (victims) throughout the country have received recall notices from the FDA and/or their medical providers informing them that they may have received illegally harvested body parts as tissue transplants that misrepresented the age/health of the donor and did not test for disease. (Sacramento)
Have you received stolen body parts and illegally processed bone and tissue implants? Contact us for a free and confidential legal consultation.

According to the charges filed against Biomedical Tissue Services and its employees, more than 1,000 corpses were harvested from area funeral homes. Forging consent documents, death certificates, and concealing disease and substance abuse were among the allegations, including the almost archaic charges of body stealing and opening graves. (Read More)

Seven funeral home directors linked to a scheme to plunder corpses and sell the body parts for transplants have secretly pleaded guilty to undisclosed charges.
Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes said that a grand jury voted to bring a new indictment in the case that adds allegations involving funeral homes in New York City and Rochester since evidence shows that many more funeral directors were involved. (USA Today)

Even though the New Jersey based human tissue collection agency forged and unlawfully confiscated body parts, non-profit organ procurement organizations urge the public to continue to donate organs which are necessary for life-saving transplants. Currently, more than 90,000 people await a life-saving organ transplant nationally and at least 6,500 a year die waiting for an organ that never comes. If one person says yes to organ and tissue donation, this one person has the opportunity to save or enhance more than 50 lives. (Morning Call)

The main priority of the FDA Human Tissue Task Force (HTTF) will be to assess effectiveness of the new human tissue regulations, which went into effect in 2005. Of particular interest will be a review of recently reported findings that some tissue recovery businesses are not following federal requirements for tissue recovery. (Medical News)

A dozen people treated in Wales have body parts stolen from a New York funeral parlor. Two facilities have identified a dozen patients who were treated with bone grafts bought from the U.S. company, Biomedical Tissue Services, which is at the center of a body part stealing scandal. Patients received their stolen body parts from University Hospital in Cardiff and Llandough Hospital in the Vale of Glamorgan. Three more patients from the private Bupa Hospital in Cardiff received bone grafts from Biomedical Tissue Services. Hospital managers took the appropriate steps to reassure patients that the risk of infection was minimal. (IC Network)

Stolen Body Parts Reach the UK
A number of British patients may have received bone grafts from contaminated body parts stolen in the US according to the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency. MHPRA identified 77 pieces of bone that were imported into the UK last year from the New Jersey-based Biomedical Tissue Services.
in 2005, the US Food and Drug Administration ordered a recall of the potentially tainted products and said many patients could have been exposed to HIV and other diseases.