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Team says China harvests Falun Gong organs Thu Jul 6, 3:34 PM ET A respected Canadian human rights lawyer and a former Canadian cabinet member lent their weight on Thursday to charges that China has been killing Falun Gong dissidents so it can use their organs. The two men -- lawyer David Matas, and David Kilgour, former secretary of state for Asia and the Pacific -- spent two months investigating the accusations, which China has regularly denied. "It is simply inescapable that this is going on," Kilgour told reporters as he and Matas released their findings. They provided transcripts of...

After years of denial, China has acknowledged that most of the human organs used in transplants here are taken from executed prisoners and that many of the recipients are foreigners who pay hefty sums to avoid a long wait. Speaking at a conference of surgeons in the southern city of Guangzhou, Deputy Health Minister Huang Jiefu called for a strict code of conduct and better record-keeping to stem China's thriving illegal organ trade, state media reported. "Apart from a small portion of traffic victims, most of the organs from cadavers are from executed prisoners," Huang said Tuesday, according to a...

This morning, I renewed my driver's license. Of course, on the application they asked me if I wanted to donate my organs in the eventuality of my death. Being an altruist by nature, my first reaction was, why not, it could help somebody. But then a fear crept into my head - what if I was seriously ill, and "they" decided to hasten my as of yet not-inevitable death to harvest my organs? While my first reaction was that is absurd, I decided to chose "no" given the well grounded fear that in today's society, where life is given no...

At Wal-Mart's 1992 general meeting, founder Sam Walton asked shareholders to sing God Bless America. The 15,000 Wal-Martians responded to Sam's call - even though Walton had been dead for two months. Walton's request to the shareholder-cum-revival meeting in rural Arkansas - channelled through a spotlit executive crouching on bended knee to speak to the departed Deity of Retail - was scarcely surprising. Wal-Mart is America's most patriotic, flag-waving company. But look under the flags. Stores are decked out like a war rally. Stars and Stripes hang from the ceiling. Cardboard eagles shriek 'Buy America!' But one independent group sampled...

NEWARK, June 16, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – In some jurisdictions the effort to produce more organs for transplant patients is being aided by plans to “streamline” the medical criteria for “brain death” so that organs can be harvested from patients who are still breathing and have a heartbeat. The New Jersey State Board of Medical Examiners wants to change the rules to allow just one physician to declare brain death. In addition, the rule that currently requires at least one of the two required physicians declaring “brain death” to be a neurologist or neurosurgeon would also be eliminated. The New Jersey...

Chinese Military Doctor Witness to over 60,000 “Involuntary” Organ Donations – most from Falun Gong Organs extracted from live people and people who survive are cremated alive By Terry Vanderheyden SHENYANG, May 3, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – China's 30 years of brutal, forced abortion to implement its one-child policy and its subsequent devaluing of human life has led has led to a new atrocity. A Chinese military doctor has revealed that he has personally encountered falsified documents for over 60,000 detainees – many of them members of the Falun Gong religion – which falsely claim that the individual named is voluntarily...

SHANGHAI (Kyodo) Two Japanese nationals in their 50s received heart transplants between 2001 and 2004 at a Shanghai hospital whose organs mainly come from death-row inmates, sources at a Taiwanese company that arranged the procedures said Thursday. Japan was seemingly unaware of the cases, as a survey released March 9 by the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry said there were no cases of Japanese receiving heart transplants in Asia outside of Japan. Ethical and medical concerns have often been raised regarding organ transplants in China over issues that include the use of organs of prisoners on death row and uncertain...

The head of a New Jersey biomedical firm has been charged in a plot to steal tissue from cadavers at New York City funeral homes and sell it for transplants nationwide, a law enforcement official said Wednesday. Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes was expected to announce indictments on Thursday alleging that Michael Mastromarino, owner of Biomedical Tissue Services, of Fort Lee, N.J., ran an illicit body parts ring, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the indictments still were sealed. Three co-conspirators also will be charged, the official said. The district attorney's office declined comment. A call...

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...

Calling it a danger to public heath, the Food and Drug Administration shut down a biomedical firm on Friday amid allegations the company covertly harvested human tissue for profit at funeral homes in the New York city area and elsewhere. The FDA sanction against Biomedical Tissue Services of Fort Lee, N.J., was the latest development in a brewing scandal involving scores of funeral homes and hundreds of looted bodies, including that of "Masterpiece Theater" host Alistair Cooke. Federal and local authorities have been investigating whether the firm's chief executive, Michael Mastromarino, and a business associate paid off funeral homes so...

When it comes to the body, they say you can't take it with you when you die. But they didn't say it should be sold from the back of a truck. Or that you should not have the right to give a fully informed consent for whatever it is that medical science wants to do with your remains. Recently it was revealed that a group of criminals was stealing bones from bodies at crematoriums in New York. They were then sold to for-profit tissue banks in New Jersey and Florida. Among the victims was the late host of PBS television's...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The bones of the late British broadcaster Alistair Cooke were stolen by a crime ring that snatched body parts to sell for transplant procedures, according to reports in two New York newspapers Thursday. Citing sources close to an investigation by the Brooklyn district attorney's office, the Daily News said Cooke's bones were snatched before his cremation and sold for more than $7,000 to two tissue processing companies. It quoted Cooke's daughter, Susan, as saying she had learned of the theft last week and was shocked and saddened by it. A spokesman for the Brooklyn district attorney's...

Stolen Human Tissue Stolen human tissue ends up in several mountain patients who went into the hospital for surgery. The material was stolen from funeral homes in New York that removed bone and tissue from corpses without getting permission from families. Now hospitals around the state are looking into whether any of their patients got the stolen tissue. Officials at Mission Hospitals say 16 patients may have received some of the stolen tissue. They believe that although the tissue may have been stolen it was still sterilized and tested for infectious diseases. Mission Hospitals' Dr. Dale Fell says patients were...

New questions were raised yesterday over France's pioneering face transplant operation when a leading medical ethics professor said the surgery had been conducted with undue haste, as it emerged that both the donor and the recipient of the skin graft had attempted suicide. The medical team that carried out the 15-hour operation eight days ago was accused of ignoring ethical questions in the bid to be first, and of using a rival doctor's technique. The saga took a further twist when it became clear that the donor and the 38-year-old transplant patient had been involved in suicide attempts.

She was mauled by a pet Labrador in May, leaving her with severe facial injuries that her doctors said made it difficult for her to speak and eat. The dog was put down. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051205/ap_on_he_me/face_transplant_10

MARLY, France - The French doctor behind the world's first partial face transplant insisted Monday that his patient had not tried to commit suicide before she was maimed by her dog _ although a British newspaper said she had acknowledged it in an interview. The contradiction is one of the mysteries surrounding last week's groundbreaking operation that grafted a nose, chin and lips from a brain-dead donor onto the severely disfigured 38-year-old mother of two teenagers. The headline-grabbing case raised questions about the ethics of performing such a dramatic operation on someone who may have suffered psychological troubles. London's Sunday...

Harvesting Fetal Body Parts By Kelly Patricia O'Meara [Reprinted with permission of Insight. Copyright 1999 New World Communication, Inc. All rights reserved.] The distribution of fetal body parts to scientists is a million-dollar industry. Researchers claim it's a necessary evil, but others fear it may encourage some grim abuses. Scientists depend on human body parts for research they believe may yield breakthroughs in a number of diseases, such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, that affect millions of people. But the public largely is unaware of the way the laundry list of body parts for scientific research is filled. Those who oppose...

THE market in body tissue in the US is believed to be worth more than $500 million (£288 million) a year. (snip) Heart valves are said to fetch up to $7,000 each in the US, and skin $1,000 per square foot. A body could be worth about $150,000, according to Art Caplan, Professor of Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. (snip) In some cases people in charge of willed-body programmes have profited illegally. In 2002 Allen Tyler, the head of the cadaver programme at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, pleaded guilty to 66 counts of illegal mutilation....

Michael Bruno's life story was uncomplicated: He was an immigrant who worked hard, spoke his mind and succumbed to cancer two years ago at 75. "Typical Italian cab driver,'' recalled his son, Vito. "He had an opinion about everything.'' But a recent investigation has uncovered a ghoulish side to Bruno's death. Authorities believe his body and those of hundreds of other people -- including famed British broadcaster Alistair Cooke -- were secretly carved up in the back rooms of several funeral parlors citywide to remove human bone, skin and tendons without their families' permission. Authorities allege the body parts were...