KYIV (AP) – Ukrainian prosecutors on Friday opened criminal investigations into the alleged illegal medical use of tissue and stem cells from human embryos by medical facilities that lacked the proper licenses.
The Prosecutor’s General’s Office insisted, however, that it found no evidence that material from aborted fetuses were being widely used in Ukraine or to support media allegations that organs and tissue were being harvested from orphans. But prosecutors noted that their investigation was ongoing.
Prosecutors accused an official at a hospital in the eastern city of Donetsk of offering patients shots of blood and embryonic cells obtained from dead human embryos without a license. Another criminal probe was opened into a medical official in Kharkiv, also in the east, for allegedly giving a patient medicine prepared with human tissue in exchange for an unidentified gift. In Crimea, a medical center was accused of illegally carrying out transplant operations using fetal material. The alleged acts occurred in the last two years.
None of the hospitals or those charged was identified, and the Prosecutor General’s Office said it had no further information.
Treatments that use embryonic stem cells and tissues from aborted fetuses have drawn increasing attention in Ukraine and neighboring Russia, where clients are promised everything from younger looking skin to a cure for impotence.
Abortion is legal in Ukraine and the law allows aborted fetuses to be given to pre-approved medical institutions that have the required licenses.
