I can’t find a link for this, but there was just a story on the Beeb about hospitals in Ukraine taking healthy babies from their mothers, killing them, and then extracting stem cells for use in injecting people with incurable diseases. (The patients are paying a small fortune for these injections, with no proof that they’ll accomplish anything at all.)
According the BBC, it’s a real horror story, with the mothers not knowing anything about what’s happened to their children. The BBC has video of autopsies being performed on these infants where the doctors doing the autopsies were almost postitive that the infants did not die of natural causes.
WTF? My flesh crawls at the thought that someone could do this to a baby. The horror of mankind knows no bounds.
This sounds a bit less than plausible. A child who has reached gestation no longer has any stem cells except in the umbilical cord. The whole point of stem cells is to get them when they are still multiplying but are also undifferentiated.
(This is not to say that some unethical types would not resort to killing babies to pass off collected cells to desperate recipients who were clueless about the actual nature of stem cells, of course.)
Dunno. They mentioned a specific hospital (number 46, IIRC) in Ukraine, and they stated that they’d made copies of the video available to some European governmental authority. The piece was primarily about “cowboy medicine” (their phrase) in stem cell research, and had a brief interview with a British woman who’d traveled there to be injected with stem cells, spending her life savings to pay for the treatment.
I remember a similar story a few years back, claiming that Ukrainian women were having babies and then selling them for organ transplants after birth. I posted a link here and several people pointed out it was probably an urban legend. This sounds like an updated version.
This does not pass the sniff test. Frankly, I think that at best you saw a privately-made PR hitpiece from some pro-life group, prettied up to look like a news broadcast.
Ukraine hospitals perform stem-cell research using umbilical cord tissue and (AFAIK) tissue from aborted fetuses. I wouldn’t put it past any number of people to try and inflate that into something more and broadcast in a PR video in the wee hours of the morning.
That’s it. The piece I heard had a little more info in it, including an interview with the mother of a baby that was born alive (she said healthy as well), the docs didn’t want to show her her daughter, then later, she was told that her daughter had died, but wasn’t given any details, nor was she allowed to bury the body.
There’s a radio documentary linked to this that is forthcoming - it was trailed this morning, so is likely to be on their “listen again” site in the next day or so.
If there is anything to this story, it has nothing to do with real science. The umbilical cord is a source of stem cells–& it’s a free byproduct of birth. However, random injection of cord blood cells would have no particular clinical results–except for graft versus host disease.
Why would dismembered corpses be results of bone marrow harvest? You can get larger amounts of marrow from live & well human adult donors.
Perhaps they were grinding up the little bones to make bread. Is Baba Yaga behind it all?
This is a variation of a common urban legend. Note: that DOES NOT mean it’s necessarily untrue, it just means that some suspicion is warranted. Major news sources sometimes fall for urban legends, and report them as news, usually only after verifying them with multiple sources, which themselves have fallen for the story. Jan Brunvand had an article in Western Folklore a couple of years ago on that topic.
The article itself is very circumspect. I suspect that this is a combination of the urban legend with suspicious circumstantial evidence which, at first sight, suggest the worst; upon further investigation, I predict we’ll find shoddy record-keeping, poor notification procedures to the grieving parents, and a host of other troubling ethical issues, but no research-driven infanticide.
Don’t be misled by that film. (What was the name?) The Hag needs no shovel to roast kids. She will not burn. She cannot die so long as Mother Russia endures.
