FDA needs to be more vigilant in monitoring, tissue banks.

New York Senator Charles Schumer was very upset and has sent a letter to the acting head of the Food and Drug Administration, Dr. Andrew von Eschenbach. In his letter he had asked the FDA to provide a full account of the problem.

The confusion started when it was reveled that the tainted tissues were used for the patients in case of tissue transplants. Schumer asked the federal officials to probe into the matter about the case of the Brooklyn funeral home selling body parts. It was distributing it to a Biomedical Tissue Services, at New Jersey without proper consent. This tissue service in turn sold it to five other tissue banks.

Schumer said that the investigation is going on and the hospitals are asked to follow proper rules while obtaining the tissues.

FDA issued a letter on October recalling a tissue under the pretext of improper screening and in the previous month a Nassau woman has stated that she had contracted syphilis after the bone graft that she received during a back surgery at Franklin Hospital Medical Center.

She also received a letter from the FDA and then found out that she may have received improperly screened tissue from the Regeneration Technologies, which is a Florida based company that obtained tissue from the Biomedical Tissue Services (BTS).

But the officials say that they are not sure whether the infection is entirely due to the usage of the improperly screened graft. But the North Shore-LIJ Hospital system said that they are very careful in such issues as it involves one’s life and they said that they follow the procedures.

Schumer said that he had allotted $1 billion for the development of the tissue bank industry and asked the federal officials to more careful because these areas more pone to mistakes as it involves a large sum of money. Hence the FDA is taking various measures by registering all the tissue banks and routinely checking their conducts.

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