The Food and Drug Administration has said it's concerned that the bone and tissue could be infected with the AIDS virus, syphilis and hepatitis, but the risk of infection is small.

The FDA, which did not return requests for comment, has not said whether any patients have ailments linked to the tissue, nor has it revealed how many people received it.

However, a document filed in a South Dakota lawsuit states that 13 plaintiffs nationwide claim they have contracted a disease.

The South Dakota case was brought by Charles Geigle of Oliver County, N.D., who claims he received transplanted bone tissue that might be infected.

He had back surgery April 30, 2004, at Sioux Valley Hospital in Sioux Falls, according to his complaint filed in U.S. District Court.

Defendants in the lawsuit, which seeks class-action status, have asked for a delay so they can argue that it should be transferred to the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation, which coordinates identical federal civil lawsuits into one jurisdiction.

Of the 451 cases filed so far, 189 are in federal courts and 134 of them have been transferred to the panel, court documents state. Two other South Dakota cases are among those that have been transferred.

"The need for coordination of this national litigation is compelling. The multiple proposed classes, as well as the individual actions, are overlapping. The complaints contain virtually identical allegations in many cases," according to one document in Geigle's case.

He received a letter in December 2005 from a doctor telling him the bone tissue he received might have been illegally acquired and that he could be at risk of getting a disease.

The supplier was Biomedical Tissue Services, a now-defunct Fort Lee, N.J., company owned by former dentist Michael Mastromarino, who made millions of dollars from the scheme, prosecutors have said.

He and three other men are accused of secretly removing skin, bone and other parts from up to 1,000 bodies from funeral homes without the families' permission.

"When a funeral was scheduled to be 'open casket,' harvested bone taken from the deceased was replaced with PVC pipe and other objects so the bodies would still appear normal during the funeral proceedings," court documents state.

The men also changed the names of the donors, medical records, death certificates and other information "in order to conceal the lifestyle and medical history of the donors," the documents said.

BTS supplied bone, skin and tendons to various processors that in turn provided the body parts to distributors for common procedures such as dental implants and hip replacements. Some of the tissue came from bodies that were not eligible to be donors because of age, disease or illness, according to Geigle's lawsuit.

Because of that, Geigle said he and perhaps thousands of others now live in fear they or their spouses have been exposed to a deadly disease. He seeks more than $5 million in damages for patients who received BTS tissue from 2002 to 2005.

Geigle received bone that was processed and packaged by Regeneration Technologies Inc., a Delaware corporation, and distributed by SpinalGraft Technologies of Tennessee, a division of Minneapolis-based distributor Medtronic Inc. all of which are listed as defendants.

The FDA ordered BTS to stop operating because of the serious nature of the violations and ordered a recall of all products, which the other defendants complied with, the lawsuit states.

The FDA and Centers for Disease Control also urged people who received BTS tissue be tested for infectious disease.

Kittredge, who has not sued any of the tissue processors involved in the scandal, says she never consented to have her father’s body parts donated despite that claim in her father’s records. The papers were signed by Mastromarino and employee Chris Aldorasi.

The documents say that a person named “Susan Quint” of the Bronx identified as Cooke’s daughter consented to giving BTS the body parts. But Kittredge is Cooke’s only daughter, and she lives in Vermont, where she is a minister.

In addition, Cooke died of lung cancer, but the records list his cause of death as “cardiopulmonary arrest.” He was 95. BTS said he was 85.

The time the body was recovered was also fudged. Cooke died just after midnight March 30, 2004, but BTS lists it as 6:45 a.m. making the 9:30 p.m. recovery time look shorter and the body fresher and more suitable for processing.

Mastromarino’s lawyer said his client didn’t do anything wrong and pinned the blame on New York Mortuary Service, where Cooke’s tissue was recovered. The mortuary service’s funeral director, Timothy O’Brien, has already pleaded guilty for his role in the scheme.

Aldorasi’s lawyer says he can’t comment on the records because he hasn’t seen them.

Mastromarino, Aldorasi and two other BTS employees were charged in an indictment February in a Brooklyn court. All four have pleaded not guilty to charges of enterprise corruption, body stealing and opening graves, unlawful dissection, forgery and other counts.

It was Mastromarino who built a business that took from the dead and gave to the living. There are many legitimate businesses that do this, but authorities say Mastromarino's company was not one of them.

Authorities say Biomedical Tissue Services secretly carved up hundreds of cadavers among them, that of the British-born host of "Masterpiece Theatre," Alistair Cooke without the families of the deceased knowing about it. It then peddled the pieces on the lucrative non-organ body parts market.

Even scarier: They say the company doctored paperwork to hide the inconvenient fact that some of the dead were too old and diseased to be donors. As a result, they say, the market was flooded with potentially tainted tissue, and an untold number of patients across the country may have received infections along with their dental implants and hip replacements.

Accomplishment and rumors

To all the world, Michael Mastromarino appeared to be a man of character and accomplishment: College athlete. Oral surgeon. Family man. Author. Multimillionaire.

There were rumors. Cruceta, a 33-year-old nurse who worked closely with Mastromarino for three years, recalled asking his boss if it were true that he'd had run-ins with the authorities.

"He told me it was all lies," he said.

There were several malpractice lawsuits an occupational hazard for a doctor tackling tough cases, his lawyer says. But dental-board records reveal other troubles.

Mastromarino was arrested in July 2000 for being under the influence of drugs and possessing a hypodermic needle and Demerol, according to the documents. His lawyer, said he became addicted to painkillers while being treated for a back problem.

The criminal charge was eventually dropped, but because his urine tested positive for controlled substances cocaine and another painkiller, Meperidine he agreed to surrender his dentistry license for six months and enter rehab. He was later caught practicing without a license a second offense resulting in a four-year suspension from the profession.
But by then, he had begun another career.

Using his contacts with companies that produce material for dental implants, Mastromarino opened Biomedical Tissue Services in Fort Lee, N.J., in 2001.

In 2002, Mastromarino sought licensing to do business in New York. As the company's chief officer, he was asked on an application to the state Department of Health whether he "had charges sustained of administrative violations of local, state or federal laws, rules and regulations concerning the provisions of health care."

"No," he answered.

The license was granted.

Turning to funeral homes

Femurs. Tendons. Heart valves. Swatches of skin from the thighs, abdomen and back.

The body parts, though no longer of any value to their owners, became big business for Mastromarino. His lawyer said he was among the first in the industry to figure out that one way to meet the high demand for donated human tissue traditionally procured in the controlled environment of hospitals was to turn to funeral homes.

Deals were cut with funeral directors in New York City; Rochester, N.Y.; Philadelphia; and New Jersey: the company would pay a $1,000 "facility fee" to harvest body parts on their premises.

Three-man teams were dispatched to mortuaries. Two workers would extract the parts. A third would bag them and put them on ice until they could be stored in a freezer at the company's headquarters.

Internal company documents suggest the firm had, at least on paper, a strict set of rules for obtaining signed consent for the procedures. A script instructed interviewers to tell family members, "We are about to proceed with the medical social history questionnaire. I have about 40 questions, and this interview should take about 20 minutes."

Sample question: "Did the deceased have a tattoo, ear or other body piercing or acupuncture in the past 12 months in which shared instruments are known to have been used?"

It seems no questions were asked in hundreds of cases.

Family members have told investigators no one sought permission for donations. The signatures on the questionnaires, they said, were forged. Mastromarino, through his lawyer, has blamed funeral home directors, insisting it was their job to get consent. The directors say it was the other way around.

As early as September 2003, the FDA detected trouble at Biomedical Tissue Services.

In a routine inspection, an investigator found evidence the company had failed to properly sterilize its equipment, and had no records of how it had disposed of tissue that failed screening for HIV, hepatitis and syphilis.

But nothing came of it. The FDA backed off after Mastromarino insisted he had voluntarily cleaned up his operation. In a letter, he told officials he would "look forward to your agency revisiting our facility."
Detective: "I was shocked"

In November 2004, New York City Detective Patricia O'Brien responded to a complaint from a funeral director in Brooklyn. The director said the parlor's previous owner had stolen down payments for funerals.

But once inside the funeral parlor, she sensed something far more sinister.

The detective was surprised to find an embalming room that looked more like an operating room, with a steel table and bright overhead lights. When she reviewed old files, she found the names of biomedical companies. She later "Googled" the names and learned each was involved in tissue transplants.

O'Brien had gone into the investigation thinking she was dealing strictly with "a financial situation," she said. "I had no idea. I was shocked."

The NYPD's Major Case Squad widened the investigation, interviewing the relatives of 1,077 dead people whose bodies were harvested for body parts. Only one said permission was given.

Meanwhile, the director of a Denver blood center, Dr. Michael Bauer, had been hired by several tissue banks to review medical charts of donors to make sure tissue was safe.

On the evening of Sept. 28, 2005, while flipping through charts at his desk, he spotted a notation on a woman's chart saying she had chronic bronchitis. As a precaution, he picked up the phone and dialed the number listed for her doctor.

"All I wanted to know was whether the doctor thought that might be an acute infection," meaning something present when she died, Bauer recalled. If so, the germ might still be in her tissue and make it unsuitable for transplant.

A business answered, one "so unrelated to medicine that it didn't feel right to me."

So he picked up another chart and called another doctor.

Then another. And another.

Each time, no doctor answered. In each case, it appeared the charts were falsified.

"I got through the first 10, and that's when all the hair on the back of my neck stood up," Bauer said.
Like a "cheap horror movie"

The case, said the prosecutor, is like a "cheap horror movie."

Authorities released photos of exhumed corpses that were boned below the waist like a freshly caught fish. The defendants, they alleged, had made a crude attempt to cover their tracks by sewing plumbing pipe back into the bodies in time for open-casket wakes.

Lawsuits filed by implant patients accuse Biomedical Tissue Services of exposing plaintiffs to hepatitis and other infectious diseases. Families of the dead have sued, too.

The Food and Drug Administration shut down the company amid its own investigation this year. The agency said it had uncovered evidence the firm failed to screen for contaminated tissue. Parts were recovered from people who had diseases that may have been "exclusionary," an FDA report said.

Death certificates in the company's files, the FDA said, were at odds with those on file with the state: The company's version made people younger than they were, and altered the cause and time of the deaths.

Those responsible "were just some irresponsible crooks who were doing this and slipped through the cracks," said Dr. Stuart Youngner, a Case Western Reserve University medical ethicist and head of the ethics committee at Musculoskeletal Transplant Foundation, a large nonprofit tissue bank. "The good tissue banks don't do that."

Cruceta is free on $500,000 bond. His name is on papers indicating that he was the one who conducted interviews with family members of the deceased interviews that authorities say never took place. He insists he signed only because he was instructed to do so; prosecutors don't believe him.

Mastromarino, 42, remains free on $1.5 million bail after pleading not guilty to body stealing, forgery, grand larceny and other counts. He refused requests for interviews by The Associated Press.

If convicted, he faces as much as 25 years in prison.

• A trade group, the American Association of Tissue Banks, requires accredited members to follow high standards, but without the FDA doing the same, hospitals and doctors can buy from unaccredited suppliers that offer tissue quicker or cheaper.
• Tissue isn't tested as thoroughly as blood is for infectious diseases.
• The FDA sets no limits on age or health of donors, or how long after death tissue can be taken.
• Funeral homes don't have to report deaths to organ procurement groups, leaving them outside a regulatory system and able to cut side deals to supply body parts.
• Doctors often know little about the origins of tissue they use. Some hospitals buy it like surgical gloves and other supplies based on price and availability. Patients are not always told they are receiving tissue from a cadaver or offered alternative treatments.
• Hospitals and doctors do not have to report tissue infections to health officials, and evidence suggests that many are missed.
• The FDA requires no medical training to run a tissue bank or procure tissue.

• The FDA does not conduct background checks on owners or operators of tissue banks, nor does it lay out any minimum qualifications or standards.
• New York requires tissue bank applicants to provide information about their background, including arrests and professional misconduct, and requires the Health Department to consider the "character and competence" of bank owners and operators. But Matromarino did not disclose his problems and state officials did not check.
• Regulators conducted no inspections of Biomedical's facility during its first year and inspections afterwards failed to detect practices that regulators now allege were fraudulent and unsafe.

In Rochester, the scandal has resonated with particular strength. Not only did at least 60 area residents receive implants collected by Biomedical, but some collecting was done locally.

The company opened its sole branch office in Brighton in November 2004, and harvested tissue from as many as 65 cadavers in local funeral homes.

"I feel my dad's remains were what's the right word? defiled, I guess, or desecrated," said Don Ulp, a Greece resident who has been told by authorities that tissue was removed from his 84-year-old father's body without permission at a Hilton funeral home last year.

Ed VandeWater, a Williamson, Wayne County, resident, experienced similar feelings of violation after he learned in February that he had received a Biomedical bone implant in his neck.

"It makes you sick to see what this company was doing," he said. "How did nobody ever catch this?"

Background unchecked

Mastromarino, who had been an oral surgeon in New York and New Jersey since 1993, was arrested in July 2000 in New Jersey for drug possession and being under the influence of a controlled substance. His arrest followed a number of incidents, later documented in court filings, that were attributed to his illegal use of drugs. Mastromarino, 43, was stripped of his dentistry licenses in both states. But he quickly hit upon another way to earn a living: running a tissue bank.

He had used bone implants extensively in his oral surgery and had done research on the topic, said his lawyer, Mario Gallucci of Staten Island.

And the booming industry was in constant need of new sources of raw material: Between 1994 and 2003, the number of bones grafts distributed for implanation grew sixfold, to 1.3 million, said P. Robert Rigney, Jr., chief executive of the American Association of Tissue Banks.

By March 2002, Mastromarino and a partner had formed a tissue bank company, BioTissue Technologies Ltd., and were preparing to go into business.

Over the next few months, the company would be licensed by New York and registered with the FDA with regulators never showing awareness of Mastromarino's licensing woes, drug problems or arrest record.

To register with the FDA, a tissue bank operator need only fill out a one-page form, which asks for name and address, nothing more.

"FDA does not do background checks on owners or operators of tissue banks," said FDA spokeswoman Julie Zawisza. FDA rules also don't set minimum qualifications or standards for tissue bank operators but do say that employees must have the "necessary education, experience and training to ensure competent performance of their assigned functions."

The FDA reserves the right to check employees' background and training during inspections. But there is no mandatory inspection of a company when it begins operation, and there is no set interval at which inspections must be done.

FDA regulations do not require that tissue harvesters have the consent of survivors. McNeill said it is left to the states to create and enforcedonor-consent rules.

New York, one of the few states that regulates tissue banks, has a detailed license application that requires applicants to provide information about background. The application also asks about arrests and professional misconduct, and requires the Health Department to consider "character and competence.

In his application, a copy of which the Democrat and Chronicle obtained under the Freedom of Information Law, Mastromarino did not reveal anything about his drug arrest or the loss of his dental licenses.

Mastromarino answered no to a question about sustained or pending charges "of administrative violations of local, state or federal laws, rules and regulations concerning the provision of health care services or reimbursement for such services."

Asked whether Mastromarino should have discussed his dentistry problems in the application, Health Department spokesman Robert Kenny said he could not elaborate because it would be "subject to legal interpretation."

The Health Department would not speculate about whether Mastromarino's background would have disqualified him from operating a tissue bank, although spokeswoman Claire Pospisil said "a criminal conviction or sustained administrative charge related to operation of a health-care services site or funeral home is grounds for denial of a license."

A check with dentistry licensing officials in either state would have shown that Mastromarino had surrendered his license and the reason behind it but the Health Department did not make those checks, Kenny said.

"We didn't take action at that time. We had no reason to believe from his application that we would have to (check)."

Through his lawyer, Mastromarino declined to comment.

Mastromarino's tissue bank application was dated June 17, 2002.

On July 8, in a different setting in Albany, he admitted to the state dentistry board that he had practiced dentistry without a license in New York. A second charge, that of insurance fraud, was dropped. His license, which he had surrendered two years earlier, was formally suspended for four more years.

Four days after that, the Health Department issued him a provisional one-year tissue bank license.

Passing inspections

The opportunity for additional oversight went by the wayside as BioTissue opened.

State regulations require an inspection at the time a tissue bank opens.

But in the case of Mastromarino's company, that inspection was deferred because he moved the base of operations from Brooklyn to Fort Lee, N.J., shortly after the company began recovering tissue. He also transferred his licenses and registration from BioTissue to Biomedical Tissue Services.

Unlike most tissue recovery companies which are nonprofit and do their work in hospitals Biomedical was set up for-profit, and it harvested at funeral homes, which is not barred in New York state.

Biomedical's first inspection came a year after the company opened and had removed human bones, tendons and other tissue from roughly 200 cadavers and sold them for use in medical procedures.

Records indicate that on July 21, 2003, state Health Department inspector Tem Gonzalez, visited Biomedical's office in Fort Lee, N.J., looked around and spoke to Mastromarino. He directed Gonzalez to Daniel George and Son, a Brooklyn funeral home owned by his one-time partner in the tissue business, Joseph Nicelli.

Two days later, Gonzalez visited the funeral home, according to a written summary of his inspection obtained by the Democrat and Chronicle. He spoke with Nicelli, who told Gonzalez he offered families the option of tissue donation; Biomedical was summoned when a family consented.

Gonzalez also wrote that Nicelli told him the tissue collection was done in a second-floor room otherwise used for autopsies and body washing rituals.

"The room looks clean but not equipped with air filtration system or environmental control system," Gonzalez reported.

Sixteen months later, a New York City police detective, looking into financial irregularities at Daniel George, would discover the small room sparking an inquiry into Biomedical's tissue harvesting practices. That inquiry ultimately led to Biomedical's closure last fall, and to the indictment of Mastromarino, Nicelli and two other men Feb. 23 on charges they plundered human remains at Daniel George without consent.

The state Health Department was not aware in 2003 of any accusations of improprieties at Biomedical, said department spokesman Kenny, and had no reason to suspect any link between the second-floor room and the allegations that would surface later.

"Based on what we knew at the time, everything appeared to be legitimate," he said.

The inspector did cite the company for seven violations, including lack of involvement by Biomedical's medical advisory committee and its medical director, Dr. Mary Basco, a Virginia physician.

In retrospect, another citation for failure to keep a log of blood samples taken from donor cadavers is noteworthy. The samples are tested for evidence of certain infectious diseases as a way to ensure the tissue is safe for implantation.

Since the investigation of Biomedical has gone public, accusations have surfaced that the company submitted blood samples that came not from the cadavers, but from some other source.

Perhaps the most serious offense, though, was that Biomedical was overstepping its license, which permitted it to recover only musculoskeletal tissue bones and tendons, primarily.

Gonzalez had found that Biomedical also was taking skin and cardiovascular tissue heart valves, veins and the like from cadavers. The Health Department requires separate authorizations for each type of tissue recovery because the regulatory requirements differ between tissue types.

Biomedical submitted a corrective plan, which the Health Department accepted; no fines were assessed. Instead, regulators forwarded Biomedical an application for recovering cardiovascular tissue, to make lawful what it had been doing already.

By January 2004, the state Department of Health had awarded Biomedical a pair of full, four-year tissue bank licenses — one for tissue intended for implantation, the other for tissue to be used for research. Biomedical never harvested for research, records show.

Biomedical's business was booming. It had recovered tissue from 61 cadavers in 2002 and 240 cadavers in 2003, according to reports it filed with the Health Department.

By 2004, Biomedical was averaging more than one body a day. Its total that year 383 cadavers surpassed those reported by established nonprofit tissue agencies in Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse and Albany.

Meanwhile, the FDA inspected Biomedical's facilities at least twice, according to Kevin Vickers of Honeoye, Ontario County, who worked as a tissue recovery specialist for Biomedical in New Jersey and later Rochester.

The agency's spokeswoman, Zawisca would not disclose whether the FDA ever inspected the company. But Vickers remembers being at the Fort Lee office in late 2004 when FDA inspectors undertook a four-day inspection of the company.

Vickers said the inspection, which he considered routine, resulted in Biomedical receiving "a clean bill of health." Gallucci said much the same. The FDA's Web site has no sanctions or warning letters to indicate otherwise.

One reason that repeated inspections did not uncover anything untoward may be that Biomedical, according to prosecutors and others, was engaged in rampant fraud forging signatures on donor consent forms, altering medical histories so that donors conformed with suitability rules, faking blood tests.

Records appeared to be in order when inspectors called; only afterward was the alleged fraud uncovered.

"That's part of our problem here," Rigney said. "This (tissue banks) organization has been in existence for 30 years, and we know of no such situation prior to this, where you have allegations that people forged donor consent forms and falsified medical information."

'Significant violations'

Tissue industry screening initially failed to halt troubling practices by Biomedical.

At least some of the five companies that purchased tissue specimens from Biomedical did their own audits of the company and tested its tissue, Rigney said.

Some processors ruled out some Biomedical tissue, he said. "It could have been bacteria, or quality of the bone."

But no one sounded the alarm on Biomedical until late September 2005, when New Jersey processor LifeCell Corp. reported it had found discrepancies in Biomedical's records.

That company and others quickly began a recall of all material that had come from Biomedical.

This time, the FDA acted quickly. After learning of the record discrepancies, it appeared at Biomedical's New Jersey office in early October for another inspection.

FDA inspectors spent more than three weeks at the task, which also included a review of records and visits to several funeral homes involved with Biomedical.

The company's New York licenses were "inactivated" on Oct. 14 after the scandal went public and a recall began of all tissue from Biomedical.

More than three months later, when the FDA summarized its findings, it ordered Biomedical to cease operations, and reported that it had uncovered "significant violations," most of which were attributed to inaccurate records.

Among the findings the agency cited on Jan. 31:

• eight instances in which company records included false statements about a donor's age or cause of death.
• three cases in which the records misstated where tissue recovery was done.
• six instances in which it failed to disclose that a donor had been hospitalized.
• two instances where records listed a fictitious spouse on a consent form.
• two occasions in which records misstated the time between death and tissue recovery.
• two cases in which records failed to indicate that autopsies had been done.
• one instance in which Biomedical failed to ensure a funeral home had proper ventilation and refrigeration.

Michael Mastromarino, the owner of Biomedical Tissue Services of Fort Lee, N.J., Joseph Micelli, a Brooklyn mortician, and two other men were awaiting arraignment on charges including enterprise corruption, body stealing, opening graves, unlawful dissection, and forgery, according to Josh Hanshaft, an assistant district attorney in Brooklyn.

Prosecutors alleged that the men had conspired to take bones, skin, and other body parts secretly from cadavers, without the permission of the families.

The indictments were the latest chapter in a widening scandal that involved scores of funeral homes and hundreds of looted bodies, including that of the ''Masterpiece Theatre" host, Alistair Cooke, who died in March 2004.

The bodies came from funeral homes in New York City, Rochester, Philadelphia, and New Jersey that contracted with the Brooklyn funeral parlor for embalming.

Mastromarino, Micelli, Lee Crucetta, and Christopher Aldorasi allegedly forged birth certificates and consent forms to disguise the fact that some bodies were too old for harvesting techniques.

''I think we can agree that the conduct uncovered in this case is among the most ghastly imaginable," said Rose Gill Hearn, commissioner of the city Department of Investigation. ''It was shockingly callous."

''This case is unique in the utter disregard for human decency," said the Brooklyn district attorney, Charles Hynes.

The 122-count indictment alleges that the defendants forged death certificates and organ donor consent forms to create the appearance that the tissue had been legally harvested. The activities spanned from 2001 to 2005, prosecutors said.

Mastromarino went into the tissue business after losing his license as an oral surgeon, prosecutors said. Micelli was his copartner, they said.

Prosecutors allege that Mastromarino secretly removed bones, tendons, heart valves, and other tissue from cadavers at Micelli's funeral parlor.

A defense lawyer, said in a statement Wednesday that Mastromarino had followed existing rules regulating the harvesting of tissue donated by families at funeral homes.

Mastromarino ''vehemently denies doing anything illegal or wrong," the lawyer said.

Federal and local authorities launched the nine-month investigation after, they said, they received a tip that Mastromarino and others had paid off funeral homes so they could take tissue from the dead without their families' knowledge.

Investigators say that some body parts came from elderly people and perhaps victims of infectious diseases, and that the paperwork had been doctored to say they had been younger and healthier. They say the suspects had profited by selling the tissue to companies that had turned it into products used for disk replacements, dental implants, and other surgical procedures done by unsuspecting doctors across the United States.

In Cooke's case, investigators say Biomedical Tissue Services removed his bones without his family's permission before he was cremated. Cooke died of cancer at 95, but documents listed the cause of death as heart attack, and lowered his age to 85, the investigators said

Mastromarino said he ''was not responsible for interacting with the families of the deceased nor in obtaining the documentation needed to harvest the tissue," his lawyer said.

Late last year, the Food and Drug Administration ordered a recall of the potentially tainted products.

In one such case, a Long Island woman sued the North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System after she tested positive for syphilis after undergoing back surgery there. After the surgery, the hospital informed her that donated human tissue harvested by Biomedical Tissue Services used in her surgery could have been tainted. A subsequent test showed that the woman did not have syphilis, and the hospital yesterday filed a request for a court order, seeking sanctions against her for ''filing frivolous litigation."

• LifeCell Corporation of Branchburg, NJ
• Lost Mountain Tissue Bank of Kennesaw, GA
• Blood and Tissue Center of Central Texas in Austin, TX
• Tutogen Medical, Inc., of Alachua, FL
• Regeneration Technologies, Inc., of Alachua, FL