The Pantagraph from Bloomington, Illinois • Page 7

The Pantagraph Sunday, February 19, 2006 A7 www.pantagraph.com OUR NATION Body-part scandal alarms patients "What it does to the whole public perception of bone and all other grafts can be catastrophic." Dr. Stephen Pineda orthopedic surgeon in Springfield By Llndsey Tanner ASSOCIATED PRESS CHICAGO Every year more than 1 million Americans have medical pro-; cedures that use bone or other tissue a cadaver like disk replace- ments or dental implants. But what if the donated tissue came from someone who died of cancer? Or Or hepatitis? That worry caused by a ghoulish scandal in the body parts business has i led to distress for hundreds of people, and some prospective patients are now reconsidering how they want their surgeries done. Experts familiar with the situation say patients' chances of getting a disease from the suspect tissue are small, but doctors are urging them to be tested. "This is diabolical if what has been alleged has been done," said Dr.

Stephen Pineda, an orthopedic surgeon in Springfield. "What it does to the whole public perception of bone and all other grafts can be catastrophic." Investigators are trying to determine if a New Jersey company, Biomedical Tissue Services of Fort. Lee, sold bone and tissue illegally obtained from corpses that were too old, sick or cancer, age or other ailments. Doctors concede that's theoretically possible but unlikely to cause problems with the grafts. Carol Yates, a Marion, Ohio grandmother, is among patients advised to get tested and has set up a Web site to give recipients of the suspect tissue a chance to share their concerns with others.

Yates, 47, said her doctor told her in December that BTS bone was used in her neck surgery a year ago. "All it's done is caused me a lot of worry," Yates said. "I haven't taken the test yet. If it came back positive, I couldn't handle that right now." otherwise ineligible to be donors. BTS closed last month.

The Food and Drug Administration and federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say the risk of infection is low but unknown. So dozens of hospitals have contacted hundreds of patients around the country who got body parts traced to the company between early 2004 and September 2005. They are being offered testing for AIDS, hepatitis and syphilis. But some patients worry about tissue or bone from bodies weakened by Mardi Gras swoops down streets Chilly weather, Katrina lliin crowds Key senator wants new court for spy program ASSOCIATED PRESS WASHINGTON, D.C. The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, breaking ranks with the president on do JAMf im 1 -J i mestic eavesdropping, says he wants a special court to oversee the program.

But less than a day later, a top aide to Sen. Pat Roberts, sought to clarify his posi By Michelle Roberts ASSOCIATED PRESS NEW ORLEANS The first of the major Mardi Gras parades with marching bands, brightly decorated floats and flying plastic beads rolled down New Orleans' streets Saturday, greeted by small but celebratory crowds. Despite the widespread destruction from Hurricane Katrina, officials decided to allow a scaled-back Mardi Gras celebration this year. New Orleans parades, put on by private groups, were restricted to one corridor to help cut the cost of police protection and trash pickup. Five parades rolled back-to-back in New Orleans on Saturday under cloudy damp skies through neighborhoods left mostly unscathed by the Aug.

29 storm. More were scheduled for Sunday and next weekend, leading up to Fat Tuesday on Feb. 28. Capt. Juan Quinton, a police spokesman, said no major problems were reported along the route and that crowds, though small, were having fun.

Many of the residents attending the parades said Mardi Gras is an important part of the city's heritage. Children and families often gather on the same street corners year after year. "What would the city be without Mardi Gras?" said 17-year-old Sadie Abies, standing on Lee Circle in the same spot three generations of her family has gathered for decades. Her mother, 37-year-old Shelly Guidry conceded she had conflicts about the cost to the city, especially given how many people remain displaced from homes. City's population halved Less than half the city's pre-Katrina population of about 480,000 has been able to return since the storm, and New Orleans' efforts to cover parade costs with corporate sponsors flailed, forcing the City Council to allocate $2.7 million to cover expenses.

Still, Guidry was on the street with family members and her 3-year-old son strapped in a seat atop a ladder, a tradition for children who grow up here during normal years when towering crowds of adults make it too difficult for children to catch beads. "It's memories here," she said, gesturing down the street. Pat Roberts Jiff 1011 'Ept jf. rJJ mm nf ftf A Associated Press ALEX BRANDON Parade-goers catch beads from a float in New Orleans on Saturday. Mardi Gras season is in full swing with five parades rolling through the city despite lingering effects of Hurricane Katrina.

Catastrophic flood risk increased NAACP wants elections in New Orleans delayed "We are reinventing Katrina all over again." Jeffrey Mount professor of geology, University of California, Davis tion. Roberts told The New York Times that he is concerned that the secret court established by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act could not issue warrants as quickly as the monitoring program requires. But he is optimistic that the problem could be worked out. "You don't want to have a situation where you have capability that doesn't work well with the FISA court, in terms of speed and agility and hot pursuit," Roberts said Friday. While he didn't know how such a process would work, Roberts also said the much-discussed National Security Agency program "should come before the FISA court." Roberts, was not available on Saturday The Senate Intelli-' gence Committee's majority staff director, Bill Duhnke, said the Times story did not reflect "the tenor and status" of the ne-! gotiations between Congress and the White House, as well as within Congress.

Looking at other changes Duhnke said Roberts is look- ing at changes within the feder-'al law but not necessarily involving the approval of the court. "The senator remains open to a number of legislative and oversight options," Duhnke said Saturday. "His preference is always that the entire (intelligence) committee be briefed and involved in oversight issues. He also realizes that, as you negotiate between the branches, that isn't always possible." Duhnke said Roberts hopes that during this negotiation process that all sides can be seeking comment. Officials of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People were speaking By Andrew Bridges ASSOCIATED PRESS ST.

LOUIS Concentrated development in flood-prone parts of Missouri, California and other states has significantly raised the risk of New Orleans-style flooding as people snap up new homes even in areas recently deluged, researchers said Saturday Around St. Louis, where the Mississippi River lapped at the steps of the Gateway Arch during the 1993 flood, more than 14,000 acres of flood plain have been developed since then. That has reduced the region's ability to store water during future floods and potentially put more people in harm's way, said Adol-phus Busch IV a scion of the Anheuser-Busch brewing family who is chairman of the Great Rivers Habitat Alliance. the Advancement of Science. In California, development in the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta, where flood control efforts first started in the mid-1800s, represents a major risks to cities such as Stockton as they expand, said Jeffrey Mount, a professor of geology at the University of California, Davis.

"We are reinventing Katrina all over again," Mount said. Mount estimates a two-in-three probability over the next 50 years of a catastrophic levee failure in the massive delta region east of San Francisco. Similar development has occurred around Dallas, Kansas City, Los Angelesi Omaha, and Sacramento, said Gerald Galloway, a professor of engineering at the University of Maryland. half-life of the memory of a flood is very short. You can already hear it in Washington, D.C: New Orleans where?" Galloway said of the lack of action in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina last summer.

The research was presented Saturday at the annual meeting of the American Association for By Erin Texelra ASSOCIATED PRESS NEW YORK The Department of Justice should postpone upcoming elections in New Orleans until displaced voters have been located, NAACP officials said Saturday. "We're worried about the voting rights of our people in New Orleans who are not, for the most part, in New Orleans," said Bruce S. Gordon, NAACP president. "People should still have a say in what happens in the communities that were ravaged by Katrina." Last week, Gordon asked U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to make sure election procedures are fair.

The Voting Rights Act allows federal officials to scrutinize election changes that may hurt minorities. "If it requires us to take legal action, we will fight this," Gordon said. A Justice department spokesman did not return calls at the organi- Bruce zation's annual Gordon board meeting. Last week, Louisiana lawmakers approved plans to set up satellite voting centers in 10 state parishes and allow evacuees to vote by absentee ballot in the April 22 city elections. NAACP officials said that date is too soon.

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