Tissue fraud fears spread

From the Chicago Tribune--

Tissue fraud fears spread
`Ghoulish' deception affects 10 hospitals

By Jeremy Manier and Tonya Maxwell
Tribune staff reporters
Published February 3, 2006

Soon after Don Whelpley read a Tribune report Thursday morning about
suspect donor tissue that reached Chicago-area patients, he opened a
registered letter with disturbing news from his oral surgeon: Some of
the bad bone tissue had been used in Whelpley's gums.

The letter recommended that Whelpley, a 57-year-old Naperville
grandfather who has been married 37 years, be tested for HIV, syphilis
and hepatitis.

It is the kind of scene being repeated around the region and the
country, as hospitals and doctors' offices are informing patients that
the tissue in their bone or tendon grafts might not have been properly
screened.

Most of the major medical centers in and around Chicago are affected,
including at least 10 hospitals and 62 patients who received the
grafts. The tissue came from a New York operation suspected by state
and federal officials of using looted cadavers and phony documents
that hid the donors' medical conditions.

That apparent deception is rippling through the medical community,
bringing new grief to bereaved families and shock to many tissue
recipients. Investigators believe one victim of tissue looting was
late public television host Alistair Cooke, whose daughter said
Thursday in an interview that the thought of his corpse being violated
was "ghoulish and Dickensian."

The news that Whelpley received suspect tissue instantly infected his
imagination. Suddenly he is jumpy about household objects like the
blood-stained towel he left on his kitchen sink.

"I was thinking, two days ago, I cut myself in the kitchen while I was
cooking and I wiped the blood on a dish towel," he said. "I have a
wife and three grandchildren. What if one of them picked it up and got
something? I threw it away after I got that letter. It really scared
me."

Tissue that has been traced back to the New York cadavers was used in
Chicago patients for a variety of needs, hospital officials said.

Six patients at Rush University Medical Center received bone used for
spinal fusion operations, a spokeswoman said. At Advocate Christ
Medical Center in Oak Lawn, five patients had tendon grafts from the
suspect source. Three University of Chicago Hospitals patients got a
fibrous tissue called fascia, used in abdominal surgery.

"A single donor can help more than 25 people," said Kim McCullough of
the Elmhurst-based Gift of Hope Organ and Tissue Donor Network. "It
depends on which tissues are consented to and recovered."

Although organizations that legally procure tissue say the New York
incident is a rarity in their field, some victims feel the current
safeguards failed them.

Whelpley said he is aware of statements from the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration that the chance of disease transmission is minimal, and
even the improperly obtained tissue was tested and sanitized by tissue
processing centers. But he does not believe the companies involved
would pay for patient notifications and tests unless they thought
there was a real risk of disease. "In today's environment, it seems to
me corporations don't do anything unless they are afraid something's
going to come back to haunt them later," Whelpley said.

Cooke's daughter, Rev. Susan Cooke Kittredge, 56, said her father's
tissue might have been easier to steal because he died at his home in
Manhattan and was sent to a funeral home for cremation. That
effectively removed the web of documentation and oversight that
accompanies corpses in a hospital or medical examiner's office.

Kittredge said the district attorney's office in Brooklyn called her
in mid-December to say that her father's corpse had been used in a
tissue-looting scheme linked to a New Jersey-based company, Biomedical
Tissue Services. Officials from the district attorney's office would
not comment on her story.

"They said they'd found receipts for Daddy's bones," said Kittredge,
an ordained minister from Vermont.

"When someone tells you something like that, it doesn't compute," she
said. "I hung up the telephone and stared slack-jawed."

She said the documents indicated that the company received $7,000 for
bones from Cooke, who had not consented to be a donor. As a
95-year-old victim of lung cancer that had spread to his bones, he was
not eligible for donation.

Kittredge said authorities told her the tissue was passed off as being
from an 85-year-old who died of a heart attack.

Many established tissue procurement organizations have a policy of not
taking tissue from donors in funeral homes, in part because of
concerns about contamination. McCullough said the Gift of Hope donor
network only takes tissue from cadavers in hospitals and will stop at
any time if a family withdraws consent.

"There is a very strict protocol for receiving consent," McCullough
said. "I like to think most people see that this case is not the
norm."

Kittredge said she agreed that tissue donation is an admirable and
necessary gift that the dying can offer the living.

"It's because I believe so much in the idea of willing organs and
tissue that I can't bear it would be cast in a suspicious light,"
Kittredge said.

The most difficult part of the story, she said, was that the 2004
death of her father, a beloved host of "Masterpiece Theater," had
seemed "particularly easy."

"I'm a minister, and I try in my work to help people see that the body
is not the essence of how we are," said Kittredge, a member of the
United Church of Christ. "We had all these images of my father on
television or radio, so we heard from this wonderful life he had. In a
sense we were very lucky."

But since she was told about the looting of her father's corpse, she
said, she "can't get beyond that."

"I have lived with the image of my father's cadaver," she said. "And
that's not a healthy place to be."

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tmaxwell;@tribune.com
jmanier;@tribune.com
Copyright © 2006, Chicago Tribune
http://www.chicagotribune.com/technology/chi-0602030158feb03,1,5142594.story?coll=chi-news-hed

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