Beauty salons fuel trade in aborted babies
Racketeers pay Ukraine women to sell foetuses to quack clinics for £10,000 courses of 'anti-ageing' jabsTom Parfitt in Kiev The Observer, Sunday April 17 2005 Article historyAborted foetuses from girls and young women are being exported from Ukraine for use in illegal beauty treatments costing thousands of pounds, The Observer can reveal.
The foetuses are cryogenically frozen and sold to clinics [color="Navy"]offering 'youth injections', claiming to rejuvenate skin and cure a raft of diseases.
[color="navy"]It is thought that women in the former Soviet republic are being paid £100 a time to persuade them to have abortions and allow their foetuses to be used in treatments. Most of the foetuses are sold in Russia for up to £5,000 each. Some are paid extra to have abortions late in their pregnancy.
Border guards stopped a train entering Russia from Ukraine last week and arrested a 'mule' carrying 25 frozen foetuses hidden in two vacuum flasks. The man said he had bought them from a medical research centre.
Ukrainian law allows an aborted human foetus to be passed to research institutes if the woman involved consents and her anonymity is protected. But police say staff at state health institutions are selling them to private clinics offering illegal therapy.
'It is extremely difficult to detect this because there are corrupt agreements between respected doctors and academics,' said one senior officer.
[color="navy"]Beauty salons in Moscow that buy the aborted material to provide 'foetal therapy' are flourishing, despite a Russian ban on all commercial treatments using human cells other than bone marrow. The salons offer injections of stem cells, the undivided cells present in embryos that can adapt into any kind of tissue, although they are still at the trial stage worldwide.
Sergei Shorobogatko, a former Kiev policeman who is investigating the trade, said abortion clinics in the poor eastern regions of Donetsk and Kharkiv are selling foetuses - often untested for viruses such as Aids - without permission.
Abortions performed more than 12 weeks into a pregnancy are restricted in Ukraine. Older foetuses fetch extra because their curative powers are thought to be greater.
'When a doctor wants a foetus [to sell], he tells a girl there is a medical reason for an abortion later than 12 weeks,' said Shorobogatko. 'A special procedure extracts it with the placenta.'
The woman would be paid to wait until a late stage of her pregnancy, or might never even know she was duped, he said. Her aborted foetus would be passed to a middle-man or institution, which would cut it into separate organs before placing these in storage. The material was then sold and taken abroad.
Beauty courses of injections using blends of foetal cells are banned in Ukraine and Russia, but they are widely available in salons that charge up to £10,000. Wealthy clients are told the treatment can stop the ageing process, or eliminate such debilitating conditions as Parkinson's disease or Alzheimer's. One fashionable Moscow clinic approached by The Observer promised to 'take 10 years off your face'.
'We are talking about a huge, corrupt and dangerous trade in quack therapies,' said Professor Vladimir Smirnov, director of the city's Institute of Experimental Cardiology. Outside state institutes, Russian law allows only extraction and storage of human cells, but enforcement is lax.
Earlier this month the Ministry of Health announced that 37 out of 41 clinics offering stem-cell treatments in Moscow were acting illegally. Yet most continue to operate. 'What is unclear is what people are injected with,' said Dr Stephen Minger, of King's College, London. 'Are they really stem cells or a mixture of tissues?'
Ukrainians, accustomed to tales of illegal privatisations and government corruption, are not surprised. [color="navy"]'They used to say we were selling Ukraine,' said one reporter. 'Now we are selling Ukrainians; moreover, in parts.'
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/apr/17/ukraine.russia
WEALTHY Russians are switching from investing their roubles in luxury yachts and designer jewellery to stem cell therapies in an attempt to maintain the vitality of youth into their old age.
[color="navy"]The treatments, in which stem cells extracted from aborted or miscarried foetuses are injected into the body, is the latest anti-ageing weapon, following Botox injections and facelifts, [color="navy"]to keep Moscow's youth-obsessed high society looking young.
And those who have admitted visiting the clinics now springing up across the Russian capital [color="navy"]claim it works and has wiped years off their age.
Pharmaceutical magnate and former presidential candidate Vladimir Bryntsalov, 58, one of Russia's 27 billionaires, [color="navy"]is already a firm believer in the experimental treatment that can cost as much as £2,000 per session.
"[color="navy"]I had lots of wrinkles on my face, but now the skin is as smooth as a baby's. I also had terrible scars on my body that were there since childhood, but they too have disappeared."
The foetal stem cell therapy is not only being used to smooth out wrinkles, but is also being injected into other parts of the body to get rid of cellulite and excess flab.
However, the ethical, health and legal issues surrounding the therapy are being ignored -
experts are exploiting a legal loophole in Russian law which permits the extraction and storage of embryo stem cells, but does not specify what can then be done with them.
Professor Vladimir Smirnov, director of Moscow's Institute of Experimental Cardiology and member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, recently voiced concern: "We are talking about a huge, corrupt and dangerous trade in dubious therapies," he said. "The authorities have never licensed any medical specialist to administer injections of stem cells. These methods are totally experimental and illegal."
Stem cells are the building blocks of the human body, but are far more plentiful in embryos than in adults. Once extracted, they can be stimulated in a laboratory to develop into any type of body cell or organ including bone, muscle and body tissue.
Research into the cells in western Europe is strictly regulated as scientists try to develop the stem cell therapies for possible use on a range of illnesses including heart disease, Parkinson's and diabetes.
Equipment to extract stem cells from a human embryo is, however, extremely expensive and other critics are incredulous that beauty parlours can even afford it. They believe patients may have been injected with an embryo's tissue extracts, skin cells or even animal stem cells instead. At least one Russian patient has died after having such treatment.
Investigations are currently being carried out into an illegal baby trade that sees impoverished women from Russia and the surrounding countries selling their aborted foetuses to unscrupulous specialists for as little as £100.
The foetuses are then cryogenically frozen and sold to beauty clinics for as much as £5,000. Older foetuses fetch more, as staff at the clinics believe their stem cells have a greater curative power.
Ukrainian investigator Sergei Shorobogatko said the practice was increasing in the former Soviet republic and added that women were also being persuaded to have late abortions, even though the legal limit is 12 weeks.
"Doctors tell the women or girls that there is a problem with their pregnancy and that the baby has to be aborted, or else they are offered more money," said Shorobogatko.
Critics add that unless action is taken to curb stem cell beauty therapy, the problem will only get worse. But these pleas seem to be falling on deaf ears.
Russia's oligarchs are continuing to develop the stem cell treatment that will give them eternal youth.
Aluminium magnate Oleg Deripaska, who with an estimated fortune of more than £3bn is third on the Forbes rich list of wealthy Russians, has already invested more than £65,000 in the Institute of Physical and Chemical Biology at Moscow State University.
Professor Vladimir Skulachev, the institute director and a full member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said: "Ageing is a biological programme where oxygen is the main killer of cells. We believe that any programme can be turned off."
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