Bone Implants

Bone implant lawsuits reach class action lawsuit status

Anapol Schwartz is the lead counsel in the bone implant Vitola Class Action lawsuit pending in New Jersey. Anapol Schwartz represents more than 100 recipients of tainted body parts and bone implants as well as co-counseled with several other law firms around the country to represent their clients too. The bone implants lawsuit is filed against Biomedical Tissue Services, a now defunct New Jersey tissue bank.

Most of the individuals involved received tainted bone implants and dental implants but have not yet manifested disease. A number of people have claimed to be diagnosed with hepatitis and/or HIV. The causation in those cases is presently being investigated.

Illegal bone implants and dental implants came from the elderly and perhaps victims of infectious diseases. Authorities believe two men paid off funeral homes so they could take bone, teeth, and skin from the dead without their families' knowledge. A former dentist came to funeral homes and extracted bone, tendons and skin from corpses without the consent of relatives. Worse, paperwork was doctored to mislead hospitals and doctors that donors were actually younger and healthier and willing to donate their organs.

The Food and Drug Administration is trying to trace the tissue, which was sold to medical facilities across the United States and Canada as bone implants and dental implants. Until they were shut down by the FDA, Biomedical Tissue Services supplied bone implants, skin, and tendons to various processors, who in turn provided them to distributors.

In May 2006, a bill called the Safe Tissue Act was introduced by Congress. The Safe Tissue Act will ensure that tissue donors are protected from those who seek to profit illegally from their goodwill. The Safe Tissue Act will protect the health of tissue donation recipients by preventing them from receiving potentially harmful tissue.

The Safe Tissue Act increases the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) inspections of tissue banks, authorizes the FDA to conduct periodic audits of donation documents, establishes minimum standards for consent forms, establishes an accreditation process for tissue banks, and improves regulations on payments for donated body parts or tissue.