Free Republic

A leading medical firm has quietly recalled hundreds of human tissue products destined for transplants around the nation that were supplied by a North Carolina body parts broker believed to have a tainted history. The broker used an unsterile embalming room to carve up dozens of corpses to procure tissue, a Raleigh funeral home director said Tuesday. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration shut down the body broker on Friday, but refuses to say how many people may have received potentially risky tissue. It is the second scandal in less than a year in the booming tissue transplant industry. Cadaver...

Stepping into the van guarded by armed soldiers with five surgeons and nurses, Zheng Zhi didn’t know he was entering into a world that would haunt him for the next quarter of a century. Dr. Zheng, then a resident doctor at one of China’s largest military hospitals, knew little more than they were on a “secret military mission” near a military prison located around the northeastern Chinese city of Dalian. A light blue fabric covered the four sides of the vehicle, shielding it from any curious glances. When the door opened, four burly soldiers carried in a man whose limbs...

In the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, and Canada, people who want euthanasia can become organ donors. (A recent report in Spain showed that 13 percent of those euthanized donated organs.) Let’s call it “kill and harvest,” a policy heartily approved by our ever more crassly utilitarian medical establishment. Indeed, a recent study in JAMA Surgery applauds procuring the kidneys of the euthanized because, after five years, the organs of those killed by doctors and then transplanted have worked well — even better than kidneys donated by people after brain death. From the conclusion of the study, which discusses donation after circulatory...

WARSAW, March 11 (Reuters) - Polish border guards detained a Ukrainian woman who was sentenced in Kazakhstan to 12 years in prison for participating in an organised criminal group trading in human organs and selling 56 kidneys, prosecutors said on Tuesday. The 35-year-old woman, referred to only as Ksenia P. under Polish privacy laws, was detained at a railway crossing between Poland and Ukraine under an Interpol red notice, Marta Petkowska, a spokeswoman for the prosecutor's office in Przemysl, said in a statement. The prosecutors didn't say why the woman wasn't in prison in Kazakhstan at the time she was...

PARIS — The president of Serbia, Boris Tadic, lashed out at organized crime and its corrosive effect on the Balkans in a speech Wednesday, pressing for an international investigation of human organ trafficking in Kosovo and broad protection for witnesses. He made his comments in Strasbourg before the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, which on Tuesday adopted an investigative report that has roiled the leadership in Kosovo. It alleged that Serb prisoners were killed at the end of the Kosovo conflict in 1999 to harvest organs for transplant for an organized crime group, Drenica, with ties to the...

Hundreds of women were kept as slaves on a human egg farm in Georgia where they were fed hormones and treated like cattle. Their horrifying ordeal has been revealed by three Thai women who were freed from the clutches of the 'egg mafia' on January 30 after being exploited for half a year, tabloid Bild reports. The woman said they were held captive on a 'human farm' in the eastern European country of Georgia by a criminal organisation led by Chinese criminals, who sold their eggs on the black market. They were lured in by a job offer on Facebook,...