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2impendingdoom ago

TUTOGEN

18 Sep 2009

"A German medical firm is under investigation after accusations that it paid a middleman to cannibalise corpses in Eastern Europe so they could be sold to hospitals in the West.

Tutogen, a German subsidiary of America's RTI Biologics, is alleged to have bought up the bones, cartilage, tendons, skin, eye corneas, and heart valves from thousands of corpses for implantation in living Western patients.

The value of a single corpse to the medical industry can be worth over £150,000 and the gruesome market has sometimes attracted unscrupulous and criminal operators. The trade is worth £600 million in the United States every year.

Lena Krat, Ukrainian woman, has accused Tutogen of profiting from her father's body after buying his remains from a Ukrainian company which had misled her into signing a consent form.

"I was so upset that I couldn't think clearly," she told Der Spiegel. "If I had known that so much is cut out, I would never have given my consent."

Joseph Düsel, a senior state prosecutor in Bamberg, told The Daily Telegraph that his office was investigating the allegations. "The state prosecutor is at this time exploring whether to open a formal preliminary proceeding against the responsible parties at the firm Tutogen because of breaches of the transplantation and medicines laws," he said....