Tissue retention - Hospital practice an outrage

Our Lady’s Hospital for Sick Children in Dublin has written to about 20 parents to inform them that the pituitary glands of their deceased children were passed on to a pharmaceutical company.

This was to facilitate the manufacture of growth hormones for children in need of such help. But many issues still remain to be addressed.

In the 1960s, a method of isolating the growth hormone in the pituitary gland at the base of the brain was discovered and international efforts were initiated to collect the hormone during autopsies, as this had the potential of helping children whose growth had been stunted as a result of a deficiency of that hormone.

Irish hospitals participated in the pituitary research programmes. Brain tissue - taken during some autopsies on infants and stillborn children at Our Lady’s Hospital for Sick Children - was forwarded to the Kabi-Vitrim pharmaceutical company from 1981 to 1984.

The practice was apparently then stopped following the development of a synthetic growth hormone in the mid-1980s.

Even in the midst of their grief, many parents would probably have welcomed the opportunity to facilitate efforts to help children in need of the growth hormone, but the manner in which the whole thing was handled was contemptible.

Parents were not even consulted, much less asked for their approval, before the brain tissue was removed from the bodies of their dead children.

In some instances, the parents were not even informed that autopsies were being held. Were those autopsies necessary, or were they merely undertaken to farm the pituitary tissues?

When the arrangements with the commercial pharmaceutical company were first disclosed in 2000, Our Lady’s Hospital for Sick Children was unable to specify the remains from which pituitary tissue had been removed for such purposes. The hospital asked the company, now known as Pharmacia Ireland Ltd, for assistance in identifying the bodies that were used, but the company was initially unable to help, as it could not locate the necessary records going back over two decades.

Pharmacia Ireland Ltd has since located records that could be matched up with the hospital’s autopsy records to identify the remains from which the hormones were taken. Hence 20 of the parents who had made inquiries have now been given a definitive response.

This whole subject, reopening the trauma of the loss of a child, is incredibly messy. This is the second time that the issue has been reopened for parents, but only those whose children died at Our Lady’s Hospital have been given any answers.

Many questions still remain to be answered. Which other hospitals were involved and from whose deceased children were tissues removed? The records recently located merely related to the practice conducted between 1981 and 1984. Was this also going on earlier? There have been no details about whether the company involved provided financial remuneration, or afforded some kind of payment in kind, such medical texts, samples, or equipment to those who forwarded the vital tissues.

Our Lady’s Hospital has offered counselling for the parents involved in its latest disclosures.

But this does nothing for other parents who are being left to wonder whether the remains of their children were used for experimental purposes without their consent.