NJ man sues over bone used in operation

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A New Jersey man on Friday filed a lawsuit against three companies that harvest or market tissue for transplants and a funeral home. Gary Pieper, of Mays Landing, claims in the suit that the bone used when he underwent an operation last year was taken from a corpse without permission from the family of the deceased and was not tested for various diseases.

Pieper's lawyer said the case, filed in state court in Atlantic County, is the first of many he expects to file across the country in a situation being scrutinized by the federal Food and Drug Administration and, reportedly, criminal investigators in Brooklyn.

Pieper's lawsuit names as defendants a Brooklyn funeral home and three companies involved in obtaining and marketing human tissue such as skin, bones and eyes for transplants, as well as an embalmer and the man who ran one of the tissue firms.

But Pieper's lawyer, Patrick D'Arcy, said the wrongdoing was more widespread than that.

"Why did the tissue and bone industry allow something like this to happen? They had a duty to Gary as well as to all of our clients to make sure that something like this wouldn't happen," D'Arcy said.

D'Arcy said he his firm plans to file 15 to 20 more suits in Atlantic County in coming weeks and has more than 40 other prospective clients across the nation. He said he plans to ask for class-action status for the cases.

After a construction accident last year, Pieper underwent an operation to repair vertebrae in his neck. A titanium plate and a piece of another person's bone were fused with his vertebrae.

For such operations, the bone is supposed to come from a willing donor and be cleared for a number of diseases, including hepatitis and HIV.

In many transplants between early 2004 and September 2005, though, that did not happen, the FDA said. The common link was that the tissue was recovered by Fort Lee-based Biomedical Tissue Services before being sold to various other firms, which eventually sold it to hospitals.

In October, five firms recalled tissue they received from Biomedical Tissue Services.

But Pieper said that in his case, the bone could not be removed, raising fears of future health problems.

He said he's been tested for several diseases and said he will continue to be tested for others. He has not been found to have any diseases that could be a result of contaminated bone.

Pieper, 57, also worries that the bone implanted in him came from someone older and is too brittle to last. "I don't know the origin, I do not know the age of this bone," he said in an interview Friday. "The original harvesting the bone came from who-knows-where."

A spokesman for Memphis-based Medtronic Sofamor Danek, Inc., would not comment on the lawsuit, but said the company was merely a conduit passing along the bones. "We didn't harvest it, we didn't process it," said Medtronic spokesman Rob Clark. "We would never have knowingly distributed questionable material."

The other defendants in the case - Biomedical Tissue Services; its owner, Michael Mastromarino; Daniel George & Son Funeral Home of Brooklyn; embalmer Joseph Nicelli; and Regeneration Technologies Inc., of Alachua, Fla., either could not be reached or did not return messages Friday afternoon.

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