LiveScience.com - Surgeries Using Cadaver Tissue Pose Risks: "
Don't worry, the doctor told Brian Lykins' parents, as he prepared to use cartilage from a cadaver to fix their son's knee. A million people a year have operations that use tissue from donated dead bodies. The nation's largest tissue bank had supplied this cartilage. It was disinfected and perfectly safe, he assured them. But it wasn't.
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."
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Even doctors don't understand the risk of tissue they are using. "It comes in a nice package, it looks sterile,'' said Dr. Matthew Kuehnert, a tissue safety expert at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
"Most physicians don't even know the questions to ask,'' said Dr. Ty Endean, a Tucson, Ariz., orthopedic surgeon. "They order tissue and they leave it up to the surgical center at their hospital. And those people are just going on price.''
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