Ukraine has been exploited by rich Western companies in many ways, but rarely has it taken such gruesome and disgusting forms than those exposed by Germany’s Der Spiegel in an Aug. 28 investigative report. The magazine ran a four-part investigation called “Inside a creepy global body parts business,”
(http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,645375,00.html#ref=nlint) exposing an international scheme for harvesting and sale of bones and tissue from dead bodies in Ukraine for processing in Germany and sale in the U.S. between 2000 and 2004.
Often relatives of the deceased either had no idea of what’s going on, or consented to donating small parts of their relatives’ bodies, such as patches of skin or single bones.
However, the newspaper said a single corpse could be harvested for up to $250,000 worth of body parts, when processed and sold. Ukrainian doctors involved in the process were paid a pittance for their work, but the pay grew proportionally to the number of bones and other parts collected.
Here is how the scheme works: “Take, for example, the removal of patellar tendons with bone segments, known as bone-tendon-bone,” or BTB. When coroners supplied less than 40 BTBs on site, Tutogen paid 14.30 euros apiece. For larger numbers of BTBs, the price went up: to 23 euros apiece for 40 or more BTBs and to 26.10 euros for 60 or more. For a coroner, who makes about 200 euros ($287) a month in Ukraine, such graduated prices must have been an incentive to remove as much body material as possible,” the newspaper concludes.
The tissue was then shipped to a German company in Bavaria, processed and sterilized, and sold on to its parent company in the U.S. for vast profit: Sometimes online pharmacies charged up to 40 times more for the end product compared to what they paid for the original parts. When supply of raw materials from Ukraine was too massive, some of them were even sold to a rival company.
This is commercial exploitation of the dead, their relatives and the nation’s desperate doctors. One doctor told Der Spiegel: “All we are for the rich countries is a source of raw materials.”
Corpses join cheap labor, fertile land and beautiful women as national resources ripe for exploitation. The Kyiv Post has indirectly participated in the commercial exploitation of women by publishing advertisements that most likely promoted prostitution under the euphemistic headings of “introduction” and “relaxation.”Mohammad Zahoor, the Kyiv Post’s new owner, has stopped the practice, effective the Sept. 11 issue. He’s taken a small, but important, step to counter exploitation where he can. Now let’s hope many other people do also.
