Culture, ignorance facilitate theft of body parts

Do you care to check whether all body organs and parts of your deceased family member are intact before burying or cremating them?

Does your family demand to be represented during an autopsy or post-mortem exercise as the law requires? Or do you trust your “good doctor” or mortician to do an honest job?

For reasons of appalling ignorance or blatant negligence, Kenyans could be burying their family members without various body organs and parts, owing to pilferage of such parts by unethical pathologists and morticians who detach them from bodies for their own selfish ends.

The Human Tissue Act of 2012, The Health Act of 2017 and the National Coroner’s Service Act extensively address the subject of handling body organs, body parts and gametes of both living and deceased persons.

SUSPICIOUS DEATH
These laws discuss the circumstances under which organs and body parts may be or may not be removed and the procedures that should be followed in such exercises.

But even with the protection of the law, most Kenyans are either oblivious or simply overlook proper procedures, leaving unscrupulous medics to exploit them.

A clear-cut example is the mystery murder of Elijah Migwi at King’eero in Kabete, Kiambu County, in July this year.

Like hundreds of others collected by the police across the city and its environs, his body was taken to the City Mortuary and dumped there.

Being a suspected murder, a post-mortem had to be conducted. On the day of the exercise, Wednesday, July 26, 2018, his family arrived at City Mortuary.

Also present were detectives from King’eero Police Station in Wangige who were investigating the suspicious death.

Quite bizarrely, the family did not see the need to undergo the “unnecessary” procedure. They were present merely because they had been asked to.

INDIFFERENCE
According to his cousin Njenga Muthama, all the family wanted was to grieve their departed kin quietly and accord him a suitable send-off without “trivia”, the sooner the better.

In the end, none of the family members witnessed the actual post-mortem. As soon as the pathologist, Dr Peter Ndegwa, had completed the examination, the family transferred the body to another facility at Uplands which is closer to their Limuru home in preparation for the burial.

Furthermore, the family did not bother to obtain the results of the autopsy — only the detectives took a copy of the examination findings to assist in investigations.

This move may baffle many, but such attitude of detachment is common among most Kenyan families. The majority of them just do not care to witness — let alone scrutinise — post-mortem procedures.

Stealing body parts is not as tough as breaking into high-security vaults of a bank facility. It is easy. And when emotional turmoil is at the centre stage, grieving relatives become soft targets for manipulation.

CADAVER PREPARATION
That some relatives fear getting close to the bodies of their departed kin — some for fear of awful images — does not help matters.

This way, cleaning, dressing and embalming bodies is left almost entirely to mortuary attendants. According to a mortuary attendant who spoke to the Saturday Nation, morticians are seldom supervised in their work.

After all, few people want to watch the unnerving procedure of preparing a lifeless body for burial — which is where the horse breaks from the stable and gallops down the field.

A spot check at various mortuaries in Nairobi revealed a not-so-flattering image of how cadavers are handled.

At one busy facility, each mortician independently goes about his work in a private compartment as relatives wait at the benches outside for the body to be processed and made “more presentable” through reconstruction for those that are in bad shape.

VIEWING OF BODY
While most Kenyan communities (especially those from western Kenya) conduct body viewing ceremonies, the viewing is normally limited to the face.

“In my community, the body is moved home the evening before the burial day. The viewing happens shortly before the body is interred the following day. This allows very minimal contact with the body,” Mr Kennedy Musimba told the Saturday Nation.

“It is rare to see the torso as this remains hidden in the casket,” he said.

When businessman Peter Macharia died from suffocation in suspected suicide at his home in Kiambu County in June, pathologists Dorothy Njeru, Peter Ndegwa and Fredrick Okinyi were hired to examine his body.

After the post-mortem, several body parts, including some structures in his neck, the thyroid bone and thyroid cartilages, inexplicably disappeared.

This problem would only be discovered two weeks later on July 4 during a second post-mortem.

MISSING BODY PARTS
For months now, Macharia’s family has been embroiled in a tug-of-war with the three pathologists and Kenyatta University Funeral Home.

The matter has been escalated to a Kiambu court in a case in which the Directorate of Criminal Investigations and Chief Government Pathologist Johansen Oduor are parties.

Macharia’s family wants the court to compel the three pathologists and the funeral home to produce the missing body parts and to explain when, who and for what purpose the parts were extracted from the body.

But in an interesting twist, Kenyatta University Funeral Home has absolved itself from any wrongdoing, arguing that it does not offer pathology services, and that their facility is only used for such exercises on request.

Meanwhile, Macharia’s body continues to lie at the university mortuary, four months after he passed on, as the legal drama plays out in court. There is also no end in sight to the dispute, with the body likely to remain at the mortuary for even longer.

DIGNITY FOR THE DEAD
Who illegally harvested the said organs and what they intended to do with them is a conundrum without the barest clues.

Perhaps even foggier is whether or not the body parts will ever be recovered. While admitting that theft of body organs occurs, Dr Bernard Midia, a forensic pathologist based at Kenyatta National Hospital, emphasises that such cases are few and far between.

“As forensic medical practitioners, we are obligated to uphold the dignity of the dead through respectful handling of their body parts for whatever purpose including for research, medical-legal examination and inquests,” Dr Midia says.

“Stealing body parts or organs for whatever reason can only be ascribed to rogue professionals who disregard their oath of service,” he adds.

LEGAL REQUIREMENTS
Dr Midia explains that there must be consent from legally recognised members of the family for a post-mortem examination.

The National Coroner’s Service Act on its part says that during a post-mortem, the coroner or pathologist or a police officer who is investigating a death should be present during the procedure.

Under this Act, a family member is entitled to participate in the examination as the coroner may deem fit.

He adds: “There are standard procedures involved when internal or external bodily examinations are to be conducted. In the event that any specimens are withheld by the pathologists, statutes require that this is properly documented and made known to the bereaved persons.”