Deadly Transplants

摘要

When most of us are rolled into an operating room, the last thing we want to think about (if we are conscious at all) is what the doctors are putting inside us. We don't want to know who donated the leg veins sometimes used for our coronary bypass operations or where the liga-ments needed to hold a wobbly knee together were found. We want to be fixed, stitched up neatly, shipped out―and spared any gory details. So it was more than a little disturbing last week when the Food and Drug Administration announced it was shutting down part of the facilities at Cryolife Inc., a leading supplier of donated tissue in the U.S. The FDA charged that a number of the implants, which are processed (in the industry euphemism) from dead bodies and stored in tissue banks, had not been properly handled, leading to serious infections in at least 26 patients. The agency recalled tendons, ligaments and cartilage distributed by the Georgia-based company since October.