Posted
6/10/2006 05:31:00 PM
by Douglas
Surgery is risky, even when you're not using donated tissue from a cadaver, but something about this
story reeks more than unrefregeriated cadaver.
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.
So what if it hasn't broken any federal laws? Federal laws alone haven't killed or saved a single person. Could a federal statue on the use and preservation of cadaver tissue prevented this incident? Maybe, but if companies are scavenging cadavers for parts to sell and failing to take the remedial precautions that most of us take when we buy ice cream at the grocery store, all the federal regulations in the world are only going to annoy those companies are
already adhering to sanitary requirements. And why are they doing that now, when no regulations are in place? They don't want to get sued when parts from one of their rotting corpses kills a 23 year old kid.