UK patients face transplant recall
21 Sep 2006 by Malcolm Drury
Hundreds - possibly thousands - of people who have received pieces of bone for grafts may have to return them, following the revelation that a number of UK hospitals have unwittingly used material from stolen body parts.Last year the US Food and Drug Administration ordered a recall of human tissues provided by Biomedical Tissue Services after it emerged that the company had obtained material from suppliers who had removed it from bodies in mortuaries without the owners' consent.
Affected tissue was recalled in the US and the UK, but it has emerged that bone pieces supplied by the company have been grafted onto patients at a number of British hospitals.
Brenda Shuttleworth, a Grimsby pensioner who had a knee cap replaced at the Scunthorpe General Hospital earlier this year, told our reporter that she has already received a number of threatening phone calls from someone in Bootle demanding that she return the bone immediately.
"'E keeps going on about it's not mine, it's 'is late Uncle Fred's", she said, "and he wants it back. I'm at me wits end, what with that and the price of cat food these days."
However, Douglas Ramsbottom, the hospital's Director of Administration and Target-Missing, was quick to reassure her. He said that there is no way that individual bone pieces can be traced back to their original owners. "We got them in a package of two dozen," he said, "and they weren't labelled as to donor, so there is no way that anyone can know who was the original owner of Mrs Shuttleworth's knee cap."
A spokesman for the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency, which regulates the safety of medicines, blood and body tissues, speaking on condition of anonymity, denied that the bone material used in British hospitals had been obtained on the cheap. "We paid top price for it," he told our reporter, "and we had no reason to believe there was anything dodgy about it."
He admitted that the legal situation was "a bit of a grey area at the moment" and that it was not beyond the realms of possibility that some, at least, of the graft recipients will find themselves on the wrong end of a law suit, "especially if American lawyers get involved". However, he advised everyone to remain calm.
"Our statistics tell us that over 70% of the grafts 'take', so they will be bloody difficult to remove," he said. "Most recipients really have nothing much to worry about."
