Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
nearly every organ and tissue in the body except for the brain
and eyes. Unlike insulin, growth hormone from animals does
not work in humans. From 1963 to 1985, the U.S. Public Health
Services (PHS), part of the U.S. Department of Health and
Human Services, provided American physicians with human
growth hormone (HGH) purified from the pituitary glands of
human cadavers (dead bodies). A total of 7,700 children who
were too small for their age and had low blood levels of growth
hormone levels were treated with this material. Many of them
grew significantly.
Stop and Consider
Should all short children be treated with growth hormone? Why or
why not? What are some of the advantages and disadvantages?
However, in 1985, scientists learned that at least three men who
had been treated as children with the cadaver-derived human
growth hormone had developed a very rare and fatal degenerative
brain disease called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease ( vCJD ). Similar
discoveries were made in France, Great Britain, New Zealand,
Brazil, and several other countries that had used the procedure.
Although some individuals who developed vCJD in other countries
had received human growth hormone from the same laboratory
that provided the PHS material, others had received human growth
hormone produced in their own country. When told of the devel-
opment of vCJD in the three men, the PHS stopped providing the
HGH and notified all physicians who had received it to stop using
it on patients. By 2004, the National Institutes of Health (NIH)
had tracked down 6,272 of the 7,700 people treated with U.S.
cadaver growth hormone and found that 32 of them had developed
vCJD. When the PHS began distributing growth hormone from
human cadavers, no one suspected that preparations from the
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