The Center for Public Integrity

Citing the Center for Public Integrity’s States of Disclosure project and State Integrity Investigation as a basis for reform, the nonpartisan research group Integrity Florida has issued a report calling for stronger financial disclosure requirements in the Sunshine State.

Among the report’s recommendations: requiring Florida state officials to fill out more detailed financial disclosure forms and making that information available online in a searchable database format.

Florida ranked 26^th – a grade of D – on the 2009 release of States of Disclosure, a state-by-state comparison of legislative financial disclosure laws. To improve its standing, Integrity Florida calls for adopting requirements similar to Louisiana, which dramatically raised its ranking all the way to number one in the 2009 States of Disclosure analysis. The Bayou State required all lawmakers to disclose a wide range of financial assets, including outside income, investments, and real property holdings.  Louisiana had ranked 44th in a previous States of Disclosure analysis from 2006.   

Michigan House Democrats have cited the state’s failing grade from the State Integrity Investigation in a resolution calling for investigation of alleged election irregularities.

“A recent report by the State Integrity Investigation ranked Michigan’s government 43^rd in the country in terms of accountability and risk of corruption,” stated the resolution, issued earlier this week. “The report card gave Michigan an ‘F’ grade in areas like campaign finance and legislative accountability among other areas.”

Michigan also received F’s in the categories of executive accountability, judicial accountability, civil service management, lobbying disclosure, pension fund management, ethics enforcement, insurance commission, and redistricting. It received a single A grade for internal auditing.

Overall, Michigan received an F and a score of 58 percent on the State Integrity Investigation.

The Kentucky man died in an off-road vehicle accident last year. His liver and kidneys helped save three dying patients in his home state. Musculoskeletal grafts taken from his heart, skin and bones were used in medical products used to improve the lives of 15 people around the country.  

But soon after the transplants, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) learned the organ recipients had contracted hepatitis C. It turned out the Kentucky donor had a history of substance abuse and had served prison time. The tissue bank that recycled his remains, the CDC said, had screwed up the usual testing done to verify that tissues and organs were safe.

The CDC's Office of Blood, Organ, and Other Tissue Safety deployed a team of “shoe-leather epidemiologists” to track down the tissue before someone else got sick. Unlike hearts and other organs — or blood products that come with a unique barcode — there’s no easy way to track down tissue.

Instead the team found tissues one-by-one, calling hospitals and chasing down doctors. It took nearly a month to locate all the surgeons who had implanted tissue into 15 people. A child, later found to have hepatitis C, had received an infected heart vessel patch before the tissue recall began.

In some cases, inconsistent or non-existent recordkeeping prevents medical sleuths from ever finding potentially infected tissues. In one major case that played out in 2006, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and five tissue companies moved to recall 25,000 tissues taken illegally from U.S. donors without proper consent or testing. Eight hundred of the tissues shipped overseas were never found. 

South Carolina State Sen. Mike Rose is a lucky man. The Republican lawmaker from Summerville known for championing ethics reform lost his primary bid, with his opponent winning 60 percent of the vote — but he can still stay in office. 

How is that possible? Rose is an incumbent in an election year that has seen roughly 250 non-incumbent candidates kicked off ballots all across South Carolina because of a controversial State Supreme Court decision and a filing technicality related to campaign paperwork.

It used to be that candidates had to file a business disclosure form, called a Statement of Economic Interest, to their party official along with their petition for candidacy. But in 2010, the law was changed to mandate they also file electronically with the state’s ethics agency.

So, many candidates filed online or in person, but not both. Some did neither. (Incumbents were exempt because they already had a copy on file.)

After a lawsuit was filed to determine the fate of those who hadn’t filed properly, the State Supreme Court ruled in May that any candidate who did not file both online and in person should be removed from the ballot.

The fallout was catastrophic and meant that roughly 250 non-incumbent candidates for local and state offices around the Palmetto State were struck from their ballots in a year when all 170 South Carolina House and Senate seats were up for grabs. 

Reverberations from the High Court’s ruling are still being felt.

Consider state Senate candidate Sean Bennett who beat incumbent Rose nearly a month ago by a large margin at the polls.

In April 2003, Robert Ambrosino murdered his ex-fiancée — a 22-year-old aspiring actress — by shooting her in the face with a .45-caliber pistol. Then he turned the gun around and killed himself.

Soon after, Ambrosino’s corpse entered the United States’ vast tissue-donation system, his skin, bones and other body parts destined for use in the manufacture of cutting-edge medical products.

But before they entered the system, Michael Mastromarino, owner of a New Jersey-based tissue recovery firm, needed to solve a couple of problems. He didn’t want to have to report that Ambrosino had perished in a murder-suicide. And he didn’t want anyone to know that Ambrosino’s family hadn’t given permission for his body to be used for tissue donation.

Mastromarino solved both problems the same way: He lied.

Mastromarino was the leader of a now-infamous human tissue trafficking ring that fed an international trade in body parts. Along with tissues from Ambrosino’s corpse, he stole parts from grandmothers, electrical engineers, and factory workers, as well as from the remains of famed journalist Alistair Cooke.

The disgraced dental surgeon from Brooklyn supplied the raw material for products used for a host of surgical operations — from knee repair to plastic surgery and cosmetic implants. He was a ground-level player in an industry that makes its profits by harvesting human tissues mostly from the United States, but also from Slovakia, Estonia, Mexico, and other countries around the world. One of Mastromarino's top buyers was Florida-headquartered RTI Biologics, a processor of American, Canadian and Ukrainian body parts that trades among the high-tech companies on the NASDAQ stock exchange.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The nation's largest produce-safety testing program narrowly escaped closure thanks to a last-minute grudging reprieve from the Agriculture Department, and finding a permanent solution to keep tainted fruits and vegetables from reaching consumers could take an even bigger effort.

Each year, the tiny program screens thousands of produce samples. It has found more than two dozen bacteria-laced examples that prompted recalls of lettuce, tomatoes and other foods from grocery stores.

It was at risk of being scrapped after President Barack Obama's proposed budget slashed the effort's funding earlier this year. But USDA spokesman Justin DeJong said late Monday that although the Microbiological Data Program "does not align with USDA's core mission," it will operate through December, using existing agreements with states to keep testing for salmonella, E. coli and listeria over the next six months.

Public health officials and food safety advocates have long argued that getting rid of the program would leave the country without a crucial tool to investigate outbreaks of deadly foodborne illnesses.

If samples test positive for bacteria, it can trigger nationwide recalls and keep contaminated produce from reaching the public.

Dr. Robert Tauxe, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's top food-germ investigator, has said the program's information can be key to pinpointing foods tied to outbreaks, and it could not easily be replaced by companies' internal tests or more modest federal sampling programs.

The CDC said contaminated fruits and vegetables caused nearly one-third of the major multistate foodborne illness outbreaks last year.

On Feb. 24, Ukrainian authorities made an alarming discovery: bones and other human tissues crammed into coolers in a grimy white minibus.

Investigators grew even more intrigued when they found, amid the body parts, envelopes stuffed with cash and autopsy results written in English.
 
What the security service had disrupted was not the work of a serial killer but part of an international pipeline of ingredients for medical and dental products that are routinely implanted into people around the world.
 
The seized documents suggested that the remains of dead Ukrainians were destined for a factory in Germany belonging to the subsidiary of a U.S. medical products company, Florida-based RTI Biologics.
 
RTI is one of a growing industry of companies that make profits by turning mortal remains into everything from dental implants to bladder slings to wrinkle cures.
 
The industry has flourished even as its practices have roused concerns about how tissues are obtained and how well grieving families and transplant patients are informed about the realities and risks of the business.
 
In the U.S. alone, the biggest market and the biggest supplier, an estimated two million products derived from human tissue are sold each year, a figure that has doubled over the past decade.
 
It is an industry that promotes treatments and products that literally allow the blind to see (through cornea transplants) and the lame to walk (by recycling tendons and ligaments for use in knee repairs).  It's also an industry fueled by powerful appetites for bottom-line profits and fresh human bodies.

 

Read this ICIJ investigation.