Has anyone here been affected?

[gijanet]

I guess I have been living under a rock somewhere (not a word out of you, Ross! ), but I just read this today. http://www.star-telegram.com/629/story/246221.html

Scary stuff!!!! I hope and pray no one here has been affected by these stolen heart valves. It mentions Medtronic specifically. God, what is this world coming to? This comes way too close to the old horror story about waking up in a bathtub full of ice with a kidney gone......................eek!

Hugs. J.

 

[PJmomrunner]

Oh, swell! So, the moral of the story...verify provenance of your new body parts.

 

[Superbob]

Ghoulish! Maybe it's an early Halloween story.

 

[bvdr]

Janet, it is a very interesting article. The x-ray pictured looks like the one I saw of my neck yesterday except the plate is one level higher in my neck. Right behind the plate is where I have a new cadaver bone.

Rather than making my worried though the statistics given actually make me more confident that nothing has been transmitted in the bone. I don't know how I would feel though if I received a heart valve in that manner though. This was the first I heard about the story at all.

 

[Marty]

Very interesting. I never thought about this and I look at X-rays all day with bone grafts in the spine. A few months ago when I renewed my drivers license I gave permission for the use of any body parts if killed in a crash.The clerk seemed quite pleased with my decision.

 

[Susan BAV]

Thanks for posting that, Janet. I have read several horror stories similar to this and I think I'd read the Medtronics implication another time. My son just had knee surgery and he opted to have a more complicated surgery to take a graft from his own leg, rather than to take the chance of a graft from who knows what/whom.

I just hope Wilbur, Charlotte's friend, wasn't the unwitting donor of my valve...

 

[Superbob]

Janet: I want to emphasize I was not making light of the report. I greatly appreciate you posting it. It is a lot to process mentally right now, but stuff we need to be aware of.

 

[Susan BAV]

My Wilbur comment was because there reportedly is a secret labratory/farm near us where they grow super healthy and non-contaminated porcines specifically for medical use; and I hope I got one of those and not some wild porker from the back forty somewhere ...

My mother lives in the midwest not far enough from an enormous smelly pork processing plant where they can butcher several thousand hogs each day and they reportedly use nearly every single part of the pig, even the ears for dog chew toys... I'm assuming my valve didn't come from there...