Background: The news that the pituitary glands of loved ones had been handed over to a pharmaceutical company came from a hospital, writes Martin Wall
It has been known for more than four years that, back in the 1980s, a number of Irish hospitals gave pituitary glands taken from the bodies of dead patients to a pharmaceutical company.
However, what has re-ignited this controversy in recent days is that individual families have now been notified that it was the organs of their children that were involved.
Three and a half years ago the Government established an inquiry under senior counsel, Ms Anne Dunne, to investigate the controversy. The shocking news for about 20 parents that the pituitary glands of their loved ones had been handed over to a pharmaceutical company to make growth hormone came not from the inquiry, but in a letter from a hospital last week.
Our Lady's Hospital in Crumlin said that when the controversy first came to light four years ago the company involved, now known as Pharmacia Ireland, said it had no information about individual patients. The hospital said that recently Pharmacia Ireland had provided new details which enabled it to identify the children involved.
On Saturday The Irish Times revealed that two former Dublin hospitals, the Richmond and Jervis Street, had donated a number of pituitary glands "for research" to the pharmaceutical company. The Southern Health Board confirmed that pituitary glands taken from patients who died at Cork University Hospital were given to a pharmaceutical company, while yesterday the Coombe Women's Hospital said the practice also occurred there "for a very short period of time".
The group representing those affected by the controversy, Parents for Justice, criticised the Minister for Health yesterday for his handling of the affair and demanded a statutory inquiry. The parents want to know why their children's organs were removed and retained, who authorised this practice and did anybody, hospital or doctor, benefit financially as a result.
The parents have no faith in the Dunne inquiry which they argue has sat for 3½ years, cost over €15 million and provided no answers to date. The main hospitals have said nothing other than that they were co-operating with the inquiry. And as this investigation has been conducted in private, neither the public nor the parents are any wiser about the background to the retention of the organs.
However, in recent days new information about the pituitary gland controversy has begun to trickle into the public domain.
The pituitary gland is a small 1 cm structure at the base of the brain. Some children with a deficiency in this hormone had their growth seriously impaired.
In the 1960s a method of isolating human growth hormone was devised. By collecting this hormone from the pituitary glands of deceased patients undergoing a post-mortem examination, it was possible to provide treatment to children with growth deficiency so that they would reach normal adult height.
Such programmes were established in Britain, the US and Canada and, according to a statement from Our Lady's Hospital, Irish hospitals participated in one or other of those programmes until synthetic human growth hormone became available in the mid-1980s.
In a statement yesterday the Master of the Coombe Hospital, Dr Seán Daly, went further and said the international programmes were established in response to a global shortage of growth hormones. "Each country received growth hormone protein pro rata to the level it had donated."
However this claim has been denied by the Pharmacia Ireland, the company at the centre of the controversy.
The company also denied that it operated any quid pro quo arrangement of pituitary glands for growth hormone, as suggested by the Coombe.
The problem for the Dunne inquiry will be to square the circle of potential conflicting claims.