Tainted-implant scandal widens Posted on Fri, Mar. 24, 2006 Tainted-implant scandal widens By KITTY CAPARELLA & MARY FLANNERY caparek@phillynews.com 215-854-5880 The district attorney's office is looking into the tainted-body-parts scandal in Philadelphia, as more area patients - 16 here and 75 at the Jersey shore - have been notified that they have been implanted with potentially tainted tissue. Sources close to the D.A.'s office said investigators were reviewing medical examiner's records regarding 128 unclaimed bodies that were sent to Liberty Cremation, Inc. in 2004 and 2005 as a preliminary step to opening an investigation. D.A. Lynne Abraham would not confirm nor deny the probe, said her spokeswoman, Cathy Abookire. The crematorium is partly owned by Louis Garzone, who owns a Kensington funeral home that is under investigation by the Brooklyn D.A.'s office in a body-parts scandal that reaches across the United States and Canada. The Louis Garzone Funeral Home, on Somerset Street near Ruth, is one of 30 funeral parlors - and the only one in Pennsylvania - under investigation for supplying body parts to the FDA-closed Biomedical Tissue Services, Inc., of Fort Lee, N.J., according to sources close to the investigation. Louis Garzone, 63, has not been charged or named in an indictment. He has declined to comment. A source familiar with the Brooklyn investigation said the Philadelphia D.A.'s office had not contacted the Brooklyn D.A.'s office about the probe. Last month, Michael Mastromarino, owner of Biomedical Tissue Services, Inc.; his business partner, and two tissue-recovery workers were charged by a Brooklyn grand jury with harvesting body parts without legal consent and with taking tissue from cadavers in unsanitary conditions and without proper screening for disease. All four have pleaded not guilty. A former Biomedical employee, Kevin Vickers, told the Daily News in a report last week that he dissected dozens of corpses inside Louis Garzone's funeral home during the last two months of 2004. After harvesting spines, veins, tendons and bones, the recovery technician said, he brought them in plastic bags on ice to Biomedical. Mastromarino's lawyer, Mario Gallucci, said the Louis Garzone home was the only Philadelphia facility supplying body parts. A source familiar with the investigation said the home had sold bodies to Biomedical since early 2004. Gallucci has said Mastromarino relied on funeral directors to screen bodies for disease and to receive family permission for tissue harvesting. The Brooklyn indictment charged Mastromarino and others with forging death certificates and consent forms by altering the deceased's age and cause of death. At least 16 patients from six Philadelphia-area hospitals and about 75 from two New Jersey shore hospitals have been notified they received potentially tainted tissue in recent surgeries. The FDA ordered the recall of tissue from Biomedical and at least five vendors in October and continues to urge patients to receive blood tests for HIV, hepatitis B and C, syphillis and other diseases. At the same time, the FDA says the risk of infection is low. Meantime, civil lawsuits from Oklahoma to New York are flooding the courts on behalf of patients who received potentially tainted tissue and families who gave no consent to have their loved ones' body parts removed. In general, local hospitals have not been named in the patients' lawsuits. "We think the responsibility rests with the people who harvested the human tissue and with the companies that had obligation to test," said Philadelphia attorney Aaron Freiwald. "The doctors and the hospitals had good reason to rely on these companies to provide them with a safe product." Five Philadelphia-area hospitals have acknowledged that their patients received potentially contaminated tissue from Biomedical, or their suppliers. Four patients from Albert Einstein Medical Center and one from Abington Hospital have been notified, along with eight from Jefferson and one apiece at Hahnemann and Temple. With an additonal case from Holy Redeemer Hospital in Eastern Montgomery County, there are 16 known cases in the area. At the shore, 15 patients at AtlantiCare Regional Medical Center in Atlantic City and Pomona received suspect tissue, according to spokeswoman Jennifer Tornetta. About 60 patients treated at Shore Memorial Hospital in Somers Point also received this tissue, according to the Newark Star Ledger. The hospital did not return calls yesterday seeking confirmation. Frankford Hospital received a notification and administrators were relieved to discover that the recalled tissue for skin grafting had not yet been implanted into a patient. "It was still in the receiving area," said spokeswoman Maria Slade. "It was never used. We returned it to the supplier." Staff writer Simone Weichselbaum contributed to this report. © 2006 Philadelphia Daily News and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved. http://www.philly.com