NEWS
6A THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN ▼ HEALTH
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2006
Body scandal prompts fear
BY LINDSEY TANNER THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
CHICAGO — Every year more than 1 million Americans have medical procedures that use bone or other tissue from a cadaver — like disk replacements or dental implants.
But what if the donated tissue came from someone who died of cancer? Or AIDS? Or hepatitis?
That worry caused by a ghoulish scandal in the body parts business has led to distress for hundreds of people, and some prospective patients are now reconsidering how they want their surgeries done.
Experts familiar with the situation say patients' chances of getting a disease from the suspect tissue are small, but doctors are urging them to be tested.
"What it does to the whole public perception of bone and all other grafts can be catastrophic." said Dr. Stephen Pineda, an orthopedic surgeon in Springfield, Ill.
Investigators are trying to determine if a New Jersey company, Biomedical Tissue Services of Fort Lee, sold bone and tissue illegally obtained from corpse that were too old, sick or otherwise ineligible to be donors. BTS closed last month.
The Food and Drug Administration and federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say the risk of infection is low but unknown. So dozens of hospitals have contacted hundreds of patients around the country who got body parts traced to the company between early 2004 and September 2005. They are being offered testing for AIDS, hepatitis and syphilis.
Those are the three illnesses that the FDA requires donor tissue to be tested for, singled out because they cause long-lasting infections that pose a greater risk of transmission through transplanted tissue than short-lived infections.
But some patients worry about tissue or bone from bodies weakened by cancer, age or
other ailments. Doctors concede that's theoretically possible but unlikely to cause problems with the grafts.
Carol Yates, a Marion, Ohio grandmother, is among patients advised to get tested and has set up a Web site to give recipients of the suspect tissue a chance to share their concerns with others.
"All it's done is caused me a lot of worry." Yates said. "I haven't taken the test yet. If it came back positive, I couldn't handle that right now."
Yates,47,said her doctor told her in December that BTS bone was used in her neck surgery a year ago.
Unused body parts linked to the case have been recalled. Companies that process the tissue for medical use are required to test and sterilize it. But still, some patients awaiting operations are scared.
In the past week, two of Pineda's patients have refused donor parts and want to use their own bone for their surgeries. It's a riskier, costlier and more painful option that Pineda said most patients used to shun. He calls their reaction "completely understandable."
"People are worried." Pineda said. "We've been fielding 10 calls a day on this from patients."
It's likely that only a tiny portion of patients who got bone or tissue grafts during the last two years received tissue from BTS, said Robert Rigney, chief executive officer at the American Association of Tissue Banks.
The association accredits 91 tissue banks nationwide, including a few in Canada. They account for most of the cadaver tissue used for transplants, Rigney said.
BTS was not association-accredited, but the five processing companies that got BTS tissue are, Rigney said. They have strict monitoring and test tissue for communicable diseases, he said.
Tissue from about 450,000 donors is rejected each year because it is diseased or otherwise ineligible. he said.
A rough way to start the weekend
Jason Shafer, Hillcrest Wrecker and Towing employee, kicks the bumper off a minivan, preparing to move it from the intersection of 19th St. and Naismith Drive.. The drivers of the van and a white Ford Mustang were involved in an accident late Friday morning, according to Lawrence-Douglas County Fire and Medical.
Joshua Bickel/KANSAN
Bush plans tour to exhibit energy plan
NATION
BY JENNIFER LOVEN THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON — Record-high gasoline prices have dropped, yet there are fears another surge is around the corner. Larger heating bills this winter are still sucking it to American wallets.
With the renewed focus on an issue of top concern to Americans, they hope to keep high energy costs from dampening consumer enthusiasm and the country's economic revival — and to prevent Democrats from using it as a potent weapon in this fall's congressional elections.
Amid those anxieties, President Bush is making it "energy week" in his administration, and he and top Cabinet officials plan to crisscross the country to tout a package of energy initiatives highlighted in last month's State of the Union address.
"The best way to meet our growing energy needs is through advances in technology," Bush said Saturday in his weekly radio address. "We will pursue promising technologies that will transform how we power our vehicles, businesses and homes — so we can reduce our nation's dependence on foreign sources of energy."
One of Bush's proposals would expand research into smaller, longer-lasting batteries for electric-gas hybrid cars, including plug-ins. The president will highlight that initiative with a visit Monday to the battery center at Milwaukee-based auto-parts supplier
Johnson Controls Inc.
Proposed increased investment in the development of clean electric power sources are the focus of a stop later that day at a solar panel plant in suburban Detroit. The United Solar Ovonic plant in Auburn Hills, Mich., plans to dramatically increase production capacity.
Its parent company, Energy Conversion Devices Inc., is working on hydrogen fuel cells to power cars — a technology Bush often touts and has proposed supporting with additional federal research dollars but that most experts say will not be ready for two or three decades.
On Tuesday, with a stop at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo., the president highlights
his proposals to speed the development of biofuels such as "cellulosic" ethanol made from wood chips or sawgrass.
Six Cabinet officers are scheduled to appear at more than two dozen energy-related events in more than a dozen states over the week.
Bush said in his State of the Union address that he aimed to replace three-fourths of the country's oil imports from the Middle East over the next 19 years by increasing spending on research into such renewable fuels as a substitute for gasoline.
But even his own Cabinet members and top aides have acknowledged that, because of the way the global oil markets work, it is virtually impossible to actually replace imports from a specific region.