Human Tissue Handlers Operate Like An Industry
An Associated Press article states that the law that forbids the buying and selling of body parts doesn’t prevent companies and non-profits alike to effectively do it. The National Organ Transplant Act of 1984 (Public Law No: 98-507) “[p]rohibits the purchase or sale of human organs if such transfer affects interstate commerce [and e]stablishes criminal penalties for such violations.” In November 2004 the Advisory Committee on Organ Transplantation (ACOT) recommended to exclude certain practices from the definition of “valuable consideration” in section 301(a) of the Act: “reasonable payments associated with the removal, transportation, implantation, processing, preservation, quality control, and storage of a human organ, the expenses of travel, housing, and lost wages incurred by the donor of a human organ in connection with the donation of the organ.”
Michele Goodwin, author of ”Black Markets: The Supply and Demand of Body Parts”, argues that these fees go beyond nominal amounts and get into the domain of business operations. Both for-profit companies and non-profit organizations involved in organ transplants have recently seen strong revenue growth. Thousands of Americans die each year for lack of available organs for transplant which creates supply and demand tension.
Raj Denhoy, a medical device analyst with Piper Jaffray & Co., was quoted as saying: ”The companies are all run very similarly.It isn’t as if the people in these companies aren’t making a good living.” Tax forms examined by the AP showed that top employees in some organ nonprofits received hefty six-figures compensations.
Earlier this year the FDA ordered Biomedical Tissue Services (BTS) to cease manufacturing of human tissues at the administration had “found numerous instances where death certificates maintained in BTS’ files were at variance with the death certificates FDA obtained from the state where the death occurred, on important information such as cause, place, and time of death, and the identity of the next of kin.”
June 13, 2006 Related topics: Legal & legislative, Ethics & Scandals, Surgery, Plastic Surgery, Dermatology