When an organ donor dies, do they take just his healthy organs, or do they also take artificial things like pacemakers, heart valves, eye lenses, artificial joints, dental implants, cochlear implants, etc.? Would any of these be worth the effort of harvesting them?
This is just a collection of WAGs, but I seriously doubt it. Implants and artificial… (stuff?) is custom sized to the recipient. Only a small percentage of the recipients ever donate their organs, so it would be hard for a company to keep a full stock of all sizes of artificial knees, to use only one example.
Besides, the liability risks far outweigh any advantages. To illustrate, a local company was the defendant in a class action lawsuit when their process wasn’t completly cleaning their artificial hips, which in turn caused problems with getting the bone to adhere to the joint. This was with brand new materials; contaminated materials would be harder to clean and would have greater complications.
While there is a trade in used medical supplies, I think that it’s mostly stuff like sharps and tooling that is sold to the Third World. I would think that any hospital that can afford to do transplants is also wealthy enough to not buy used supplies.
Re-use, almost certainly not, but there might be some recycling value. Titanium is decently valuable, an implant might be gold-plated to reduce reactivity, and the batteries used in pacemakers and the like might have some recycling value too.
Pacemakers are resterilized and used in dogs on a fairly routine basis.
The FDA doesn’t allow reuse of any appliance in humans in the US, however, there is much debate about sending pacemakers to third world countries for use in the poor.
I’m sure this is already happening, clandestinely, since I worked with Mexican/American doctors who took trashed monitor lines to their border clinics to sterlize and reuse. Even though the practice was illegal in the US, it wasn’t in Mexico. They saved lives.