Children's growth hormone made from glands of infected corpses

HUMAN ORGANS infected with a rare and fatal brain disease are believed to have been used in the production of a growth hormone which has put the lives of nearly 2,000 young adults at risk, the Independent has learnt.

Mortuary technicians who were providing human pituitary glands for government scientists manufacturing the hormone say that they removed some organs from corpses infected with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), an incurable disorder of the brain. They say they knew of no government guidelines to prevent them doing so.

The hormone therapy was given to 1,900 children, to promote their growth, under a Medical Research Council programme begun in 1959. The treatment was stopped in Britain in 1985 after three children taking similar therapy died in the United States from CJD, amid fears that the hormone may have caused the disease.

Since then, nine of those who took part in Britain have died from CJD; the most recent, an unidentified man in his twenties, died last month. Last year the Institute of Child Health warned that all those who had undergone the treatment were at potential risk.

Fifty families have been granted legal aid to sue the Department of Health for negligence, which the department denies. Now, however, direct evidence has emerged that some of pituitary glands used to make the hormone in Britain were removed by mortuary technicians from bodies infected by CJD, despite research which indicated the risk of infection.

Ivan Biddle, who worked in the mortuary of Barnet General Hospital, one of the busiest in London, for nearly twenty years until 1989, says that, following the system in at least four other large mortuaries in and around the capital, he collected the pituitary from every corpse he dealt with. Some bodies were marked as dead from CJD, he says.

The pituitaries were stored in acetone and mailed to the Department of Biochemistry in Cambridge, where they were boiled into a concentrate that was then injected into the children.

Mr Biddle says that the department has tried to suppress evidence that no regulations existed to screen out infected organs.

Last year, he approached it for permission to release a long statement to the families campaigning for compensation. 'They have a right to know what happened. Nobody told us not to take the infected organs. They should have done. We know that now.'

During a meeting with two civil servants, he was warned that to release the statement would breach his duty of confidentiality to the NHS. Last week, Dr S Rejman, a senior medical officer, told Mr Biddle that to release the statement could upset families.

It has emerged that the possible risk of CJD being transmitted by the hormone has been known since 1968.

Professor Bryan Matthews, who conducted the first research into CJD, said: 'It was thought that processes of collection would eliminate the dangers of infection. We must assume that in fact CJD was passed on from organs taken from infected people.'

Families seek damages, page 3