Sorry the link dosn't work the article from the motley foolThis article I found on a Bay Area news stations website raises some questions about the ethical nature of this company.
KTVU
CALI, Colombia -- Many victims of strokes, heart attacks and blood clots in their lungs are alive today thanks to a drug called abbokinase.
In the past 20 years, millions of patients have been given the life-saving drug, which re-opens clogged blood vessels and prevents further blood clots.
But what most doctors do not know is that the key ingredient of the drug, also known as urokinase, comes from the kidneys of BABIES who die at birth.
One source, one city, one hospital
Even more disturbing is that the baby kidneys used to make the drug come from only one hospital in one city in the whole world: Cali, Colombia.
The vast majority of Cali's people are very poor, but the city is also home to notorious cocaine kingpins. Rebel guerrillas and tropical diseases are constant hazards.
A KTVU exclusive investigation sought to discover why the con-manufacturers of the drug — ABBOTT Laboratories, based near Chicago, and BioWhittaker, based in Maryland — use dead babies from just one hospital in an impoverished Third World city.
Some doctors are beginning to question the source of this "miracle drug" and the ethical problems associated with it.
"I do not understand why it is necessary to go to South America to get this tissue," said Dr. Sidney Wolfe, a health researcher formerly with the National Institutes of Health. Wolfe currently is the health research director for the consumer watchdog organization Public Citizen.
Daniel Callahan, one of the most respected medical ethicists in the U.S., said he was deeply disturbed after learning the source of abbokinase.
"The first reaction is a… vague sense of repugnance that this goes on at all," Callahan said. "It seems to me a very strange and disturbing situation."
The hidden source of abbokinase came to light about two months ago, after the FDA issued an alert warning that the drug may infect patients with potentially deadly diseases such as hepatitis or even AIDS.
That's because the kidney cells used to make the drug come from a population where tropical diseases and hepatitis are very common, and those diseases can be passed to users of the drug.
KTVU