Eye Bank Audits Corneas From Coroner

The Doheny Eye & Tissue Transplant Bank is conducting an extensive review to determine whether any of the hundreds of corneas it recovered without family permission from the Los Angeles County coroner’s office were unfit for transplant.

And as part of the “quality audit,” Doheny has agreed to notify surgeons if any of the corneas supplied from the coroner’s office during the last three years were “unsuitable for transplantation” because they came from donors considered to be high-risk for hepatitis or AIDS.

Doheny officials said they are close to completing the audit and have turned up no cases of unsuitable transplants.

Doheny officials said their audit was launched before a surprise inspection by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration late last year, days after The Times raised ethical and medical questions about the harvesting of corneas at the coroner’s office.

The Times found that under an obscure state law, Doheny paid the coroner for corneas it harvested from cadavers without the knowledge or consent of the next of kin.

Records and interviews also showed that some of the corneas were removed from the bodies of suspected drug users and recent inmates--donors considered ineligible under federal safety guidelines because of the risks of infectious diseases.