ADP and Rhode Island are at odds. If things continue as they are now, I will likely be back on call a few more nights week, sometime soon.

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Getting a lot of anony-discussion in my comments section about the weatherman-pedophile, despite the screening which usually scares folks off. I wonder if they’ve been reading my journal all along, or if I popped up on google, and I’m a forum of opportunity?

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virtual punkin carve – via whims (don’t do it at work… there’s sound and cartoons)

I like the kitty-pumpkin! Speaking of gourds…

Pardon the naked-seeming superhero tushie in the foreground.

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I’m looking forward to turning the clocks back, if only to get the illusion of extra sleep for a few days.

Having the sun up in the morning is nice too, but not really a requirement.

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so… when did photobucket drop the free host amount from 100megs to 25 megs? yeesh. I’m glad I have my own site.

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OCTOBER 27–A Florida man has been charged with attempting to run over controversial Republican congresswoman Katherine Harris with his Cadillac. According to the below Sarasota Police Department report, Barry Seltzer, 46, told cops that he was simply exercising his “political expression” when he drove his car at Harris and several supporters, who were campaigning last night at a Sarasota intersection. Seltzer allegedly drove up on a sidewalk and headed directly for Harris before swerving “at the last minute.” Harris told officers that “she was afraid for her life and could not move as the vehicle approached her,” according to the report. For his part, Seltzer–who’s a registered Democrat–told cops, “I intimidated them with the car. They were standing in the street.” He added, “I did not run them down, I scared them a little!” That explanation did not stop investigators from arresting Seltzer for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, a felony. Harris, Florida’s former secretary of state, is best known for her role in the aftermath of the state’s disastrous 2000 presidential election.

via – http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/1027042harris1.html

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Lawsuits pending after UTMB botched willed-body program

The anatomy building reeks of Formalin, a chemical used to preserve human bodies after death. In the basement morgue, University of Texas Medical Branch technician Ernest Leach is in charge of the cadavers. By the time they arrive at UTMB, the bodies are embalmed, their heads shaved. Leach takes the bodies up to the third floor via a wide, metal-floored cargo elevator.

The anatomy lab is sunny, with high windows, and a strange menagerie of human specimens in jars – female torsos, half-dissected arms, an infant’s head blackening around the eyes and mouth. One fetus is in an actual pickle jar; the lid says “Whitfield, the Pickle with the Perfect Pucker.” In this lab, medical students will dissect the human bodies, learning anatomy as they go.

With its medical reek and shiny rows of stainless-steel cadaver tanks, the lab exudes cool, professional orderliness.

Things haven’t always been as orderly as they seem.

Over the past two years, UTMB has faced a barrage of lawsuits from families of people who donated their bodies for research at that school. Papers got mixed up, body parts were shipped off, and the former supervisor of UTMB’s Willed Body Program, Allen Tyler, sold $18,000 worth of human fingernails to a lab in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Finally, in what UTMB President John Stobo called “an unforgivable failure of oversight,” the cremated remains of more than 70 bodies – from donors whose families had requested the ashes of their loved ones be returned – were commingled.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs sought to establish that this case was an exception to the sovereign immunity of state institutions, a right derived from the 11th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Sovereign immunity generally protects public universities and their employees from lawsuits when they are sued in their official capacities.

Some of these suits are still going through the appeals process in Texas courts, but judges have consistently upheld UTMB’s immunity.

UTMB lawyers declined to comment directly on the affair.

The lost remains

In the fall of 1998, San Benito resident Rolia H. Whitinger decided to will his body to science, via the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. Whitinger, an 82-year-old veteran of the U.S. Army, had long been suffering from hernias, diabetes and heart trouble. In a hospital waiting room, he and his wife, Annabelle Whitinger, found a brochure advertising the UTMB Willed Body Program. The brochure began with “Because you care, we can expand our medical and scientific horizons,” and it detailed how people donate their bodies for research at medical schools.

As Whitinger’s health continued to falter, the family decided to donate his body to UTMB upon his death.

“My husband and I talked about all of this, [and] we decided to consider this willed-body program,” Annabelle said.

In November 1998, Whitinger signed a contract with UTMB, bequeathing his body to the Anatomical Board of the State of Texas. Then, on Oct. 2, 2001, Rolia Whitinger died. He was 85.

As planned, Whitinger’s body was transferred to the Willed Body Program at UTMB. Two months later, his wife wrote to the program, requesting that her husband’s ashes be returned to her after the medical school had used and cremated his body.

UTMB promised to honor her request, and on June 13, 2002, Annabelle received a letter from Florence McMillan, Coordinator II of the UTMB Willed Body Program. The letter announced that Whitinger’s urn would be sent to Annabelle on June 28, and assured her that her husband’s body “was treated in the spirit in which it was given, with the dignity and consideration that is due every human being.”

Annabelle, along with her 39-year-old son John, was planning to move upstate to New Braunfels to be nearer to John’s sisters.

“We thought, ‘He’s going to be back with us – move with us to New Braunfels,” John said.

The Whitingers found a house, and a nearby church with an above-ground mausoleum where they planned to inter Whitinger’s ashes.

Then, on July 3, the Whitingers received devastating news. Former UTMB employee Vicky Francel called Annabelle at the San Benito Literacy Center where she worked. Francel said that, in fact, the family was not going to receive Whitinger’s ashes. The ashes had been lost.

On June 19, UTMB sent a form letter out to more than 70 families.

Annabelle’s copy began, “I am writing to express my deep personal regret that we are unable to return your husband’s ashes to you …”

How body donation works

To donate your body to science, you have to sign up with a willed-body program. According to Jerry Daniels, the assistant dean of medicine at UTMB, most donations come from grateful patients, like Rolia Whitinger, who wish to give something back to the medical institution.

When a donor dies, the willed-body program sends someone out to collect the remains.

Currently, the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston is one of the institutions from which UTMB receives its cadavers.

According to UTHSC’s willed-body donor form, a body may be unfit for research if it is embalmed, obese, emaciated, jaundiced, infected with a contagious disease, autopsied, damaged from severe trauma or suicide, or is missing any major organs.

If the body is accepted, as Rolia Whitinger’s was, it is taken to the medical school’s campus, where morgue technicians embalm and prepare it for dissection. Students at UTMB say the body’s face remains covered until they dissect the head, and many of the female cadavers still have nail polish on when they reach the dissection table.

Daniels says UTMB uses about 125 cadavers annually, and most are dissected by first-year students in the six-week Gross Anatomy course. Because Whitinger’s body was received so late in the fall semester, it may have been used for research by upper-level or graduate students.

In the Gross Anatomy course, students working in small groups dissect a body, beginning with the hands and working up the arm to the shoulder. They dissect the torso, then the face, and end with the lower limbs. In the process of dissection, students remove almost all of the body’s skin and all of the internal organs, including the brain. They bisect the spine and saw the head in half, down the middle of the face, to examine the sinuses.

The object of this dissection is to learn how the inside of a body looks. For their final exam, students go from cadaver to dissected cadaver, identifying and naming the function of various internal structures.

Like the Whitingers, many people who donate their bodies to science may not be aware of how extensive the dissection is. Annabelle said she was shocked when she learned that some bodies are disarticulated – taken apart – to be shipped to other schools. None of the literature UTMB provided to the Whitingers explained the dissection process in detail. Annabelle thought her husband’s body would be “left intact, but researched,” she said.

“I bet most people who donate their bodies don’t really know what’s going on,” said Tony Holbert, a first-year medical student at UTMB.

If potential donors were aware, other UTMB students said, they might not donate.

After the medical students are done with the body, it is cremated. In some cases, the ashes are returned to the donor’s loved ones, but Daniels said only about 25 percent of families request the ashes. The rest of the ashes are commingled and scattered at sea.

A documentary made by Thomas Cole, director of UTMB’s Graduate Program in the Medical Humanities, shows the ceremony. The ashes ride out to sea on a motorboat, in 50-gallon drums. A woman reads from the Bible as male workers, all wearing surgical masks, pour the barrels of ashes out into the sea. The boat thrums on, leaving a smoky, light-brown stream of ashes in its wake.

The controversy

In May 2002, UTMB conducted a routine audit of their willed-body program after its director, Andrew Payer, left to work in Florida. That audit discovered that Allen Tyler, then supervisor of the willed-body program, had been illegally selling body parts for profit.

UTMB papers cited by the Houston Chronicle show that Tyler sold $18,000 worth of human fingernails and toenails at $15 each to Watson Laboratories Inc. in Salt Lake City. Tyler apparently removed these nails from cadavers that had been donated to UTMB.

Watson purchasing agent Shirley Krouse told the Chronicle that Watson Labs believed Tyler was turning the money over to UTMB.

According to UTMB records discussed by the Chronicle, including some of Tyler’s checks, Tyler also made money by selling body parts – mostly human torsos – to a man named Agostino Perna. Perna, one of the middle-men in the cadaver trade, oversees the trade and transport of bodies between willed-body programs which collect from donors, and clients, like surgeons and research labs, who use the bodies.

It’s illegal to profit from the sale of human remains, but individuals or tissue banks can charge for overhead, to cover things such as shipping and handling and employee salaries.

Under Tyler’s supervision, the ashes of some donors whose families had requested the remains were mixed together. Mixed ashes can’t be unmixed, so scores of families, like the Whitingers, were unable to collect the remains of their loved ones.

Upon hearing this, 70 such families issued lawsuits blaming Tyler, UTMB, Payer and various other individuals and companies involved in the transport or cremation of donor bodies.

Tyler, who died of cancer in January of this year, was never formally charged with a crime. He was called to testify in 2003 but couldn’t because he was too sick. Nancy Herrera, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office, said the criminal investigation by that office and the FBI is ongoing, and she refused to comment.

Some of the suits against UTMB are still pending in Texas courts.

However, no rulings in favor of the plaintiffs have held up. As Scott Brister, chief justice of the 14th Court of Appeals in Houston, told The Galveston County Daily News last year, “The defense is ‘tough, we are the state. We can promise something and do something else.'”

The Texas Supreme Court refused to hear the case of several plaintiffs who appealed the ruling of immunity.

Martin Siegel, a Houston lawyer who represents the Whitingers and several other families, said since the Supreme Court has declined to hear the case, his plaintiffs’ next step will be to try to convince state legislators to waive UTMB’s immunity in this case.

Problems and oversight issues

UTMB isn’t the only American university that has harbored a cadaver scandal in recent years. At Tulane University, some bodies donated to the school’s willed-body program were allegedly sold to a broker, who is accused of selling them to the U.S. Army, which uses bodies for field-mines testing.

And a court ordered the University of California at Los Angeles to close its willed-body program this year after the program’s director was charged with trafficking in stolen body parts. Both universities are facing lawsuits from the families of body donors.

Problems have also surfaced in the private sector.

Last November, FedEx employees in Missouri noticed that an unmarked package was leaking blood, and they opened it up to reveal a leg and two arms, which were en route from a private tissue bank to an arthroscopy conference.

Despite the recent scandals, the cadaver trade remains a highly under-regulated industry. Bodies do occasionally cross state lines en route from one university or tissue bank to another, but there is no federal organization that oversees these transactions. The Food and Drug Administration does regulate institutions which process body parts for transplant into living people, but the federal government does not otherwise regulate the cadaver trade.

In Texas, the State Anatomical Board is the only organization that oversees cadaver management by willed-body programs. The board, which is composed of 11 representatives from Texas medical, dental, chiropractic and osteopathic schools issues licenses for willed-body programs and anatomy labs.

Anatomy labs are inspected once every five years, according to Board Chairman Ron Philo, who lectures at the UT Health Sciences Center in San Antonio. Board members not associated with that lab or with programs that donate to that lab perform the inspections.

In 2002, Philo told the Houston Chronicle that the controversy at UTMB has not led to a call for more oversight.

Philo declined this week to comment directly on the UTMB affair.

The fallout

Annabelle Whitinger, for one, is calling for more oversight.

“I’d like to know what, exactly, they’re going to do to make sure that this doesn’t happen again,” she said. Her son John said UTMB has done little to try and help them since Whitinger’s remains were lost. UTMB planted a memorial magnolia tree and offered the families urns with beach sand or rose petals inside. Jerry Daniels said UTMB has offered “anything that brings closure. We’ve asked [the families] what would help.”

The families were invited to a memorial ceremony in 2002, which scattered commingled ashes at sea. The Whitingers said UTMB did not provide them with an itinerary for the memorial service, and forbade cameras or recording equipment of any kind. UTMB did offer free parking for the event, but the Whitingers did not attend.

The Whitingers say that they feel betrayed by the justice system, which they feel has not recognized the wrongs done to them. John Whitinger said that, if he were to win a civil suit, he’d like to establish a literacy foundation in his father’s name. Both Whitinger and his mother have worked and volunteered at literacy centers for several years.

Daniels said UTMB has never considered offering financial restitution to the families.

“We’re absolutely not going to do that,” he said. “This is about dignity. No amount of money can make up for [this] bungling.”

The sort of sweeping change Annabelle Whitinger would like to see in willed-body regulation has not come, but Daniels said oversight has improved in the UTMB anatomy program.

The willed-body program was shut down in 2002, so now UTMB receives its cadavers from other state institutions, like UT Health Science Center in Houston. Daniels said these cadavers are “easy to trace.”

Students appreciate lab

Down in Galveston, anatomy lab goes on. The students finished their anatomy exams last week. Soon, the cadavers will be sent off to a crematorium in Santa Fe, N.M.

Robert Beach, director of the Practice of Medicine program at UTMB, said respect for the bodies is a delicate issue. Anatomy students are encouraged to treat the bodies as “their first patients,” but they must stay emotionally removed enough to dissect those patients.

“When you see the hands, you realize it’s a person,” said Jens Langsjoen, a first-year medical student at UTMB. “I think you get more out of it when you realize its a person … I try hard not to objectify.”

“I think you can objectify a cadaver and still think of it as a special thing, deserving of your respect,” said classmate Tony Holbert. “[Dissection] should be treated as a privilege.”

None of the students interviewed said they would rather work with plastic or digital models of bodies, which are being considered for use at some medical schools.

“Model bodies are not a good idea,” said first-year student Viet Pham. “As much as I hate this lab, I can see how it’s important. Sure, it stinks, but you learn a lot.”

Daniels said UTMB won’t be starting up a willed-body program anytime soon.

“We would not bring [a willed-body program] back to UTMB unless we could be absolutely sure, to the extent humanly possible, that there was zero chance of any irregularities.”

For now, students will continue using bodies that were donated to other institutions. The bodies will ride quietly across the state of Texas, bald and embalmed, to be dissected in the UTMB lab. Students will bag up the parts as they go, and the remains will be sent far away, to be cremated.

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Archives –

1 year ago – hospital trip, mr Charlie

2 years ago – babynamer, Drawbacks of a name, newt-tadpole pics, candy-corn thoughts, cat heroclix sculpts, PBS-SOP

3 years ago – musical coding, Network

4 years ago – Hanging out with buddies.

5 years ago – Newt’s eyes begin to turn color