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- CALI, Colombia -- Many victims of strokes, heart attacks and blood
clots in their lungs are alive today thanks to a drug called abbokinase.
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- In the past 20 years, millions of patients
have been given the life-saving drug, which re-opens clogged blood vessels
and prevents further blood clots.
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- But what most doctors do not know is
that the key ingredient of the drug, also known as urokinase, comes from
the kidneys of babies who die at birth.
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- One source, one city, one hospital Even
more disturbing is that the baby kidneys used to make the drug come from
only one hospital in one city in the whole world: Cali, Colombia.
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- The vast majority of Cali's people are
very poor, but the city is also home to notorious cocaine kingpins. Rebel
guerrillas and tropical diseases are constant hazards.
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- A KTVU exclusive investigation sought
to discover why the con-manufacturers of the drug " Abbott Laboratories,
based near Chicago, and BioWhittaker, based in Maryland " use dead
babies from just one hospital in an impoverished Third World city.
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- Some doctors are beginning to question
the source of this "miracle drug" and the ethical problems associated
with it.
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- "I do not understand why it is necessary
to go to South America to get this tissue," said Dr. Sidney Wolfe,
a health researcher formerly with the National Institutes of Health. Wolfe
currently is the health research director for the consumer watchdog organization
Public Citizen.
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- Daniel Callahan, one of the most respected
medical ethicists in the U.S., said he was deeply disturbed after learning
the source of abbokinase.
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- "The first reaction is a vague sense
of repugnance that this goes on at all," Callahan said. "It seems
to me a very strange and disturbing situation."
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- Practice not illegal, but is there a
need? The practice of using baby tissue to make drugs is not illegal. But
medical ethicists say there is no need to use human tissue. At least five
other drug companies make synthetic drugs that do the same thing, for about
the same price.
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- It's a lucrative market " Abbott
Labs sells about $250 million worth of abbokinase every year. But even
doctors at De Valle Hospital in Cali, for many years the source of the
kidney cells used to make abbokinase, were not aware of Abbott Labs' connection.
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- Dr. Antonio Madrid, a lead doctor in
the hospital's neo-natal intensive care unit, says it is almost impossible
to imagine removing kidneys from dead children.
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- "It is part of the culture here,"
he told KTVU. "The parents don't want the bodies interfered with.
They don't want the bodies touched."
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- 'A criminal act' Cali's Catholic Archbishop
Isaias Duarte calls the practice a "criminal act, an abomination if
it is true."
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- The hidden source of abbokinase came
to light about two months ago, after the FDA issued an alert warning that
the drug may infect patients with potentially deadly diseases such as hepatitis
or even AIDS.
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- That's because the kidney cells used
to make the drug come from a population where tropical diseases and hepatitis
are very common, and those diseases can be passed to users of the drug.
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- So why Colombia, and not the U.S. or
another Western nation? It could be that the infant mortality rate is more
than three times that of the U.S.
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- "It would certainly be easier to
get neo-natal kidney tissue in a country that has a higher mortality rate,"
said Wolfe. "But one of the reasons the mortality rate is higher is
because of more infectious diseases which itself should be a reason for
not getting kidneys from that part of the world."
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- KTVU's Randy Shandobil talks about investigating
abbokinase Non-javascript browsers
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- Evidence of the high mortality rate is
on display in the streets surrounding the hospital " there are more
than a dozen funeral homes, prominently displaying baby caskets.
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- Of the average 30 births each day at
the hospital, about 10 percent " two or three babies a day "
are lost. Part of the reason for the high rate of deaths is a major shortage
of equipment, such as incubators and even beds.
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