Thursday, July 19, 2012

Traceability Elusive In Global Trade Of Human Parts

By Kate Willson and Mar Cabra

This is the third installment in an International Consortium of Investigative Journalists series.

The trade in human tissues is virtually untraceable at a global level. Poor accountability and inadequate safeguards have prompted concerns among medical experts that products made from bone, skin, tendon and other tissues taken from the dead could spread disease to the living -- putting patients who receive tissue implants in dental surgery, breast reconstruction and other procedures at risk......
Little has been done to address this problem, despite U.S. government reports that have raised red flags for the past 15 years -- and despite continuing concerns by the CDC and the World Health Organization.....
The United States allows companies to import tissue provided the donors are not from countries, such as the United Kingdom, with a history of mad cow disease. It sets no limits based on a country's quality of transparency or human rights record. So England is out, but Ukraine is in...
In Ukraine, police have uncovered what they believe to be cases of illegal tissue recoveries that bring into question the safety and oversight of material that is regularly imported into the United States....

Continue Reading @ The Huffingtonpost 

Contributors to this story: Vlad Lavrov, Martina Keller and Michael Hudson
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists is an independent global network of reporters who collaborate on cross-borders investigative stories. To see video, graphics and more stories in this series, go to www.icij.org/tissue. This story was co-reported by National Public Radio (USA).

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