Ghouls won't like it, but transplant law needs change

By Paul Carpenter

October 1, 2006

The organ transplant industry -- with oodles of money available for lobbyists and payoffs -- has succeeded in creating body parts shortages that bring stupendous profits.

Few realized how depraved that industry is, however, until the scandals of recent months.

Thanks to a vile federal law, packs of ghouls prey on people desperate for transplants. (About 6,000 die each year waiting for organs, because most people don't designate themselves as donors.)

With shortages driving the cost of some transplant operations into hundreds of thousands of dollars, the ghouls have found funeral home directors and others willing to slip them contraband bones, skin and other cadaver parts.

One episode involves criminal charges against an owner and others at a New Jersey company, Biomedical Tissue Services, accused of a multimillion-dollar scheme to get body parts at funeral homes in New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania, and of opening graves to snatch body parts.

Tissue from one body can fetch up to $7,000 at the initial procurement level. Some body parts, such as bones, have been replaced by pipes to hide their removal from families.

More than a dozen transplant recipients, an Associated Press story said in April, got AIDS, syphilis and other diseases when tissue was taken from infected corpses involving the Biomedical case. That story referred to 17 transplant patients in the Lehigh Valley.

Last Sunday, the AP reported that new rules to tighten controls on cadaver body part suppliers are now being considered by federal authorities.

With the war on drugs in mind, I have no faith in tighter controls when markets are driven by prices. In the body-part procurement racket, prices are inflated by shortages, which are created mainly by a single federal law -- the National Organ Transplant Act, enacted in 1984 at the behest of the transplant industry.

Section 274e says this: ''It shall be unlawful for any person to knowingly acquire, receive or otherwise transfer any human organ for valuable consideration [money] for use in human transplantation....''

Violations carry five years in prison. But the very next passage exempts the procurement industry and the medical establishment. The only ones who cannot get paid -- when you provide for your organs to be donated if you die -- are the members of your family.

Consequently, only about 30 percent of Pennsylvanians opt to list themselves as donors on their driver's licenses.

I favor allowing payments to live donors, too, but certainly the laws should be modified to let your family get a share of the money if your body parts are taken after you die.

More donors would mean lower prices and more body parts available for the 6,000 who now die waiting each year. Also, that would give families some oversight, and that might help keep the procurement outfits more honest.

The medical and procurement industries like the rules (and profits) just as they are, so it won't be easy to change that federal law. Nevertheless, we have to start somewhere, and I started by asking U.S. Rep. Charles Dent, R-15th District, about his attitude.

''I'd be happy to look at the statute if there are problems,'' he said. ''I certainly want to facilitate organ donation for people in a comatose state.''

Me too, but that involves live donors, and first we need to fix the more obvious philosophical problem -- laws that discourage organ donations even after people are dead.

''Philosophically, I want to encourage organ donation,'' Dent replied, but first he needs to investigate the law and what its impact might be.

I'll take that as a campaign promise that at least one congressman will consider changing an atrocious law that serves only to enrich ghouls.

Copyright © 2006 The Morning Call.

This article posted October 28, 2006.