A second Irish hospital has confirmed that it removed brain tissue from dead patients and gave it to a pharmaceutical firm.
The practice occurred at Limerick Regional Hospital, the largest hospital in the mid-west, and continued until the early 1980s, the Mid-Western Health Board said last night.
The board is investigating the practices at its hospitals regarding organ retention and the supply of organs to external agencies. "What we can say at the moment is that we provided pituitary glands to a pharmaceutical company", the board said.
"This was part of an international effort to provide growth hormone for people with growth hormone deficiency. This stopped once the artificial form of growth hormone became available in the early 1980s."
A board spokeswoman said pituitary glands had definitely been removed at Limerick Regional Hospital, but it was not known if the practice had occurred at Ennis and Nenagh general hospitals.
The news follows confirmation by the pharmaceutical firm Pharmacia & Upjohn that it received pituitary glands from a number of Irish hospitals between 1974 and 1985. Records from Our Lady's Hospital for Sick Children, Dublin, showed that it provided the firm with at least 70 glands taken from dead children.
Temple Street Children's Hospital said it was checking its records to see if it provided glands to the firm. Tallaght Hospital - which incorporates the National Children's Hospital, Harcourt Street - said a review of 28 post-mortems performed between 1977 and 1981 found no evidence to suggest that pituitary glands were passed on in this way.
The Western Health Board is checking its records to ascertain whether glands or other organs were given to commercial firms, a spokeswoman said. The Southern Health Board said it was undertaking a similar search.
The North-Western Health Board said it had been its policy for many years not to engage with commercial companies to pass on organs removed during postmortems. The Eastern, Midland, North-Eastern and South-Eastern Health Boards said such policies regarding organ removal never existed in their hospitals.
The Faculty of Pathology of the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland said last night that, arising out of its concern that guidelines for obtaining consent from relatives for post-mortem examination should be revised, new guidelines had been issued to all hospitals and pathologists.