A Danish pharmaceutical firm yesterday confirmed that some 32 Irish hospitals had supplied it with glands harvested during post mortem operations on deceased Irish patients over a 10-year period.
Novo Nordisk said some 2,500 pituitary glands were provided by the hospitals for "minor compensation" from 1976 to 1986.
Dr Mads Krogsgaard Thomsen, executive vice-president and chief science officer at the company's headquarters in Copenhagen, said that to the best of his knowledge only pituitary glands, used at the time for the manufacture of human growth hormone, were supplied by the hospitals to the company.
Parents for Justice, the organisation campaigning on behalf of families whose relatives had organs retained without consent, claims several other glands, including pancreatic, adrenal and thyroid glands, were also given by Irish hospitals to pharmaceutical companies.
Dr Thomsen said: "To the best of our knowledge, neither Novo Nordisk nor any other associated company had any other arrangement with any other hospital in Ireland in relation to organs other than pituitary glands. But it is not possible to say this was so with 100 per cent certainty".
Novo Nordisk is only the second pharmaceutical company to be named to date for using pituitary glands from Irish patients for the manufacture of human growth hormone. It was identified on Tuesday when the Southern Health Board confirmed that Tralee General Hospital had supplied it with glands.
The first company to be identified, Pharmacia Ireland, was named last Friday when Our Lady's Hospital for Sick Children in Dublin, wrote to 20 families saying that new information from the company indicated their childrens' pituitary glands had gone to its predecessor, KabiVitrum.
Up to yesterday, 13 hospitals had admitted supplying pituitary glands to pharmaceutical companies in the 1980s. They said there was no real remuneration for this and that it was necessary so that growth hormone, then in short supply, could be made to treat children of small stature. Parents for Justice alleges their motivation was profit.
Yesterday four other hospitals - the Mater Hospital, Dublin; Ardkeen Hospital, Waterford; Louth County Hospital, Dundalk and Our Lady's Hospital in Navan - confirmed they too supplied pituitary glands removed from patients without consent.
Dr Thomsen said that 33,000 vials of growth hormone were sent to Ireland by Novo Nordisk between 1981 and 1986, way in excess of the amount manufactured from Irish pituitary glands.
He insisted there was no question of "people's pockets being lined" for supplying the organs. Only small amounts of money were provided to hospitals for collecting the glands and they were used to stock hospital libraries.
Asked for his view on the hospitals' taking the organs without consent, Dr Thomsen said: "The arrangement we had with the hospitals implied that the hospitals should comply with any local ethical, legal or other requirements when collecting organs".