Originally published February 26 2006
New York funeral homes implicated in illegal organ harvests
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
The District Attorney of Brooklyn and other law enforcement agencies are investigating the traffic of illegally harvested body parts in New York, and the investigation has led them to funeral homes, all visited by one opportunistic dentist looking to make money by extracting tissue and bone from corpses.
A macabre scandal has spread from a body-harvesting lab in New Jersey to hospitals as far away as Florida, Nebraska and Texas as hundreds of people discover that they have received tissue and bone carved from looted corpses, not least the cadaver of Alistair Cooke, the late and erudite host of PBS's "Masterpiece Theatre."
Daniel George and Son Funeral Home is one of six Brooklyn funeral homes where Biomedical Tissue Services, headed by Michael Mastromarino, below, is alleged to have harvested body parts without permission.
As many as 1,000 bodies may have been desecrated.
The former dentist came to funeral homes, investigators say, and extracted bone, tendons and skin from corpses without the consent of relatives.
The scandal raises questions about the safety and proper supervision of a billion-dollar-a-year industry that supplies skin and tissue for 1 million tissue transplants each year.
But patients are most confounded by the skin-crawling fact that no one knows from whom the bone and tissue was harvested.
Heather Augustin, 42, lives in southern New Jersey and had two disks in her neck removed last year, supposedly replaced with bone taken from a youngish corpse.
Three months later, her surgeon told her that her new neck bone had in fact come from rogue funeral homes, likely from the cadaver of a very old person.
A 41-year-old woman who underwent back surgery on Long Island and two patients in New Jersey say they contracted syphilis from stolen bone tissue.
In one case, reporters found that the English Brothers Funeral Home had forged consent and cause-of-death documents and allowed Biomedical Tissue Services to harvest the cancer-ridden body of Michael Bruno, a 75-year-old former cabbie.
Alistair Cooke died of cancer at age 95 in March 2004.
"You have lives torn asunder, and I hope the people responsible for these desecrations get their comeuppance."
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