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Exporting companies are using Chinese ships, planes, and trucks to transport dead Americans across the world for research purposes, according to a Thursday report from Reuters. A Hong Kong flagged cargo ship departed South Carolina in July carrying 6,000 pounds of human remains valued at $67,204. The container’s temperature was set to 5 degrees Fahrenheit to prevent the parts from spoiling. Relatives of the dead, meanwhile, did not realize their loved ones’ remains were being dismembered and sent to Europe and elsewhere, the report notes. Body brokers like Oregon-based MedCure rely on lax regulations to export heads, shoulders, knees and...

The search warrant executed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation at MedCure Inc headquarters here on November 1 is sealed, and the bureau and the company declined to comment on the nature of the FBI investigation. But people familiar with the matter said the inquiry concerns the manner in which MedCure distributes body parts acquired from its donors. MedCure is among the largest brokers of cadavers and body parts in the United States. From 2011 through 2015, documents obtained under public-record laws show, the company received more than 11,000 donated bodies and distributed more than 51,000 body parts to medical...

CALIFORNIA, November 6, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A San Francisco surgeon is undergoing trial for allegedly hastening the death of a terminally ill patient to harvest his vital organs. The case against Hootan Roozrokh is believed to be the first of its kind brought against an American transplant surgeon.Rosa Navarro, the patient’s mother, successfully filed suit against the hospital where the patient died and received $250,000 in compensation. Now the District Attorney’s office is pressing charges against the 34-year-old surgeon for “dependent adult abuse, administering a harmful substance and prescribing controlled substances without a legitimate medical purpose.”Roozrokh is also being charged...

Two former Philadelphia funeral directors on Tuesday admitted to selling cadavers to a ring that cut them up and sold the body parts to hospitals for implants. Gerald Garzone and his brother Louis Garzone pleaded guilty to charges that they conspired with others to take bones, skin and organs from 244 bodies in their funeral homes between February 2004 and September 2005. They were part of a scheme that plundered 1,077 bodies in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania without the permission of relatives in an operation that netted the conspirators $3.8 million. One of the bodies belonged to Alistair...

Over 1,300 Kosovo Serbs, in addition to those for whom we know they have been killed and whose remains were handed over to their families by the UNMIK during the past 8 years, are still listed as missing. In some cases the entire families were kidnapped by the KLA/UCK at some point during the 1998-1999 war and after UN/NATO took over the administration and security of the southern Serbian province. These people were taken away in an unknown direction and, for all we know, disappeared from the face of the earth. Over the years, we have learned that a number...

Belgrade, 8 April Belgrade, 8 April (AKI) – Swiss authorities banned former chief prosecutor at the UN's Hague-based Yugoslav war crimes tribunal, Carla del Ponte, from presenting on Tuesday her recently published autobiography in her hometown of Lugano, according to media reports. The Swiss federal department of foreign affairs also banned Del Ponte (photo) from presenting the newly published Italian translation of her book 'The Hunt' to journalists and the public in a bookshop in the northern city of Milan on Monday. "Carla del Ponte's book on her work as chief prosecutor of the Hague tribunal contains statements which are...

One Bulgarian doctor has been arrested for suspected involvement in human organs trafficking, Sofia's Police announced today. According to the same source, the arrested is Stanislav Hristov, the Head of the Pathology Department at the Aleksandrovska Hospital in Sofia. He has been charged with multiple violations of the regulations on human organs handling and transplantation for personal gain. The Public Prosecution Office requested the doctor to be ordered a temporary detention. When asked by Bgnes Agency to comment the case, the Director of the Sofia's Hospital, Assistant Professor Asen Zlatev, said that he would like to see the results of...

A former funeral parlor owner and embalmer accused in a plot to plunder corpses and sell the body parts for transplants has been granted a separate trial because he needs more time to recover from a serious head injury, prosecutors said Monday. Joseph Nicelli has been rehabilitating since suffering the injury in January by falling off a roof, but has not made enough progress to appear at an upcoming trial with three co-defendants. The trial is expected to begin sometime early next year in Brooklyn. The four men were charged last year with removing skin, bone and other parts from...

Health authorities are setting clinical criteria on brain death to facilitate human organ transplants, a senior official said Wednesday. A panel of medical and ethical experts have been convened to define brain death and associated clinical rules, Mao Qun'an, spokesman for the Ministry of Health, revealed. "But it's still early to make legislation," Mao told a regular press conference, apparently contradicting recent media reports that a law on brain death is being framed. Huang Jiefu, vice-minister of health and a liver transplant specialist, earlier told the China Organ Transplant forum that the definition of brain death is key to legislation....

Could local Falun Gong allegations of organ harvesting become a thorn in Beijing's Olympic crown? When Jeff Kline's mother was diagnosed with end-stage liver cancer in 2003, doctors told her there was nothing they could do. There wasn't time for conventional treatments, and her age and type of cancer made her ineligible for a transplant. At 59, with no hope of getting a new liver, she was given less than two months to live. But in the course of his work developing Web sites for nonprofits in Philadelphia, Kline came across a human-rights organization that described allegations of organ harvesting...

Hon David Kilgour and David Matas will be in Wellington Tuesday 11 September to highlight new evidence from their painstaking research into the practice of state-sanctioned organ harvesting in China. The former Canadian MP and the human rights lawyer have spent a year and a half researching and travelling in a global mission to raise awareness of the practice they conclude is "a form of evil yet to be seen on this planet." Kilgour and Matas released Bloody Harvest: Revised Report into Allegations of Organ Harvesting of Falun Gong Practitioners in China in January this year. The report almost doubles...

Mainland China's well known media Southern Weekly , published a front page article titled "China Puts A Stop on 'Organ Transplant Tourism'" on July 19, 2007. The article reported on the recent restrictions imposed on organ transplants performed on foreigners by Chinese hospitals, and exposed the inside story behind these organ transplants in Mainland China, which are performed under the rule of the Communist Party. A Very Profitable Business Organ transplants skyrocketed after 1999 and hospitals reaped huge profits. The Southern Weekly mentioned that "liver transplants increased at a shocking rate: in 1999 only 24 liver transplants were performed; in...

(HONG KONG)--Paul Lee got his liver from an executed Chinese prisoner; Karam in Egypt bought a kidney for his sister for $5,300; in Istanbul Hakan is holding out for $30,700 for one of his kidneys. They are not so unusual: a dire shortage of donated organs in rich countries is sending foreigners with end-stage illnesses to poorer places like China, Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, Colombia and the Philippines to buy a new lease of life. Lee, a 53-year-old chief subway technician in Hong Kong, was diagnosed with liver cancer in January 2005 but doctors denied him a transplant because they feared...

A San Francisco transplant surgeon was criminally charged today with allegedly attempting to hasten the death last year of a 26-year-old disabled man on life support in order to harvest his organs more quickly. The charges are the first in the nation against a physician for his role in a transplant and are sure to raise further uneasiness about a somewhat controversial practice in which organs are retrieved before a patient is brain-dead. The San Luis Obispo County district attorney's office accused Dr. Hootan Roozrokh, 33, of dependent adult abuse, administering a harmful substance and prescribing an unlawful controlled substance...

The mother of a San Luis Obispo man who died after an attempted organ donation at Sierra Vista Regional Medical Center last year claims she never gave hospital officials consent to take her son off life-support and was misinformed when agreeing to the organ harvest, according to a wrongful death lawsuit. Rosa Navarro also alleges in her June 29 civil lawsuit that a transplant surgeon misrepresented himself as her son’s doctor, an allegation the surgeon’s attorney strongly denies. She also said she agreed to the organ donation only because she believed her son had no chance of survival. Defendants in...

With the Olympics in Beijing just 500 days away, China has begun cleaning up organ trafficking practices. Not only have exports been banned, but with fewer prisoner executions, a major source of organs has dried up. The result has been a kidney shortage in South Korea. The preparations, it is said, are far ahead of schedule. With 500 days to go before the Olympic flame is lit in Beijing for the 2008 Games, construction of 31 venues in the Chinese capital is "progressing at a tremendous pace," International Olympics Committee president Jacques Rogge said this week. Even the new medal...

A Chinese cosmetics company is using skin harvested from the corpses of executed convicts to develop beauty products for sale in Europe, an investigation by the Guardian has discovered. Agents for the firm have told would-be customers it is developing collagen for lip and wrinkle treatments from skin taken from prisoners after they have been shot. The agents say some of the company's products have been exported to the UK, and that the use of skin from condemned convicts is "traditional" and nothing to "make such a big fuss about."

A Dutch reality television show in which a terminally ill woman is to select one of three contestants to receive her kidneys when she dies is to air this week despite criticism that it pushes the boundaries of the format too far.The government has called for De Grote Donorshow (The Big Donor show) to be dropped because it is "unethical" and "wretched" but the broadcaster BNN said it would go ahead to highlight the difficulties of searching for kidney donors. In the show, due to be broadcast on Friday, a woman identified only as Lisa, 37, will select a recipient...

TORONTO—"This is a Holocaust, no question about it," Toronto-based family doctor Gerry Koffman told an audience gathered in the University of Toronto's Medical Science Building on Thursday. Dr. Koffman is the Canadian co-ordinator for Doctors Against Organ Harvesting, a U.S.-based group of medical doctors that is warning the public and the medical community that there are serious ethical implications in receiving organ transplants in China. Thursday's forum discussed recent reports of widespread forced organ removal from living prisoners of conscience in that country. Based on its own independent investigations and a report by Canadians David Kilgour and David Matas, Doctors...

Now scientists create a sheep that's 15% human 25.03.07   Scientists have created the world's first human-sheep chimera - which has the body of a sheep and half-human organs.The sheep have 15 per cent human cells and 85 per cent animal cells - and their evolution brings the prospect of animal organs being transplanted into humans one step closer.Professor Esmail Zanjani, of the University of Nevada, has spent seven years and £5million perfecting the technique, which involves injecting adult human cells into a sheep's foetus.  Chimera: sheep have 15 per cent human cells and 85 per cent animal cells  He...