Body Parts

Um, ick?

Don't worry, the doctor told Brian Lykins' parents, as he prepared to use cartilage from a cadaver to fix their son's knee. A million people a year have operations that use tissue from donated dead bodies. The nation's largest tissue bank had supplied this cartilage. It was disinfected and perfectly safe, he assured them. But it wasn't.

Four days after this routine, elective surgery, Lykins — a healthy, 23-year-old student from Minnesota — died of a raging infection.

He died because the cartilage came from a corpse that had sat unrefrigerated for 19 hours — a corpse that had been rejected by two other tissue banks. The cartilage hadn't been adequately treated to kill bacteria.

None of this broke a single federal rule.

And it could happen again today — likely is still happening today — because of shoddy practices by some in the billion-dollar body parts business and the lack of government regulation.

[shudder]

Good thing NTodd's Pa's Wife's getting a kidney from a live donor.  But not right now.

ntodd