Foreskin Facecream

selkie · #1 4th-June-2007

http://thetyee.ca/Views/2007/01/30/Foreskin/

Quote:

Foreskin Facecream
-And it's not the only body part on the chopping block for vanity. Ethical?

What is the value of human parts? I am at the Body Worlds 3 exhibit with my six-year-old, and what I thought was going to be an interesting medical lesson for my daughter is turning into a strange art show and commentary on our varying degrees of values around human flesh. We are standing in front of a body called "Skin Man." Once a living, breathing human, he now stands with a thoughtful expression on his face, holding one skinned arm outstretched with his entire human dermis aloft, like a coat to be hung. I'm trying to think of some interesting ethical discussions around the value of human bodies with my child, but all I can think of is how much money his skin is worth.

In an article for The Tyee, Dr. Paul Tinari estimated that a single male foreskin can be worth upwards of $100,000. He argued that men who are circumcised have a right to the revenue made off the resale of their foreskins (just as someone who sells their hair for wigs would, for example).
But that's not the only issue in the debate over how people use and profit from foreskins. Many people are challenging the ethics and medical necessity of male circumcision, which means that any use of the foreskins after that is also in question. Then there's the fact that foreskins aren't just being sold for the medical flesh trade; rather, they're joining a few other body parts being sold in the service of vanity. And if the ethics of using human body parts, skin and stem cells for medical research and treatments are contentious, the ethics of using them for vanity's sake is a whole other conundrum.

Quote:

But not all uses of foreskin fibroblast are "medical" in nature. One of the most publicized examples of the foreskin-for-sale trend involves a skin cream that has been promoted by none other than Oprah Winfrey. SkinMedica'sa face cream, which costs over $100 US for a 0.63 oz bottle, is used by many high-profile celebrities (such as Winfrey and Barbara Walters) as an alternative to cosmetic surgery. Winfrey has promoted the SkinMedica product several times on her show, and her website, which raves, there's "a new product that boosts collagen production and can rejuvenate skin called TNS Recovery Complex. TNS is comprised from six natural human growth factors found in normal healthy skin...the factors are engineered from human foreskin!"

During the show, the doctor promoting SkinMedica cream warned that some people may have ethical questions regarding using a product that is made from the derivative of foreskins (to which Winfrey made no response). Why ethical questions? The foreskins come from circumcisions, and male circumcision is now a controversial topic. In a discussion on Mothering.com, one querent asked, "If the cream was made from the bi-product of baby afro-American clitoral skin, would Oprah still be promoting it?" There's no answer to that question on Mothering or Winfrey's site, and Winfrey declined The Tyee's request for an interview.

Quote:

Further in his defence, Fitzpatrick says that using foreskins in the first place was simply a matter of convenience. Fitzpatrick told The Tyee, "It doesn't matter if you get a fibroblast from the eyelid, the cheek, the foot or the foreskin. That cell is still a fibroblast; it does the same thing. Foreskins were used because that is a common surgery and the skin is thrown away, so why not use it for benefits? Twelve years ago when this was done there would have been no objection to using foreskin tissue."

Quote:

But Fitzpatrick acknowledges that using foreskins now is about more than convenience. Circumcision rates in Canada have dropped below 10 per cent and they are dropping in the U.S. as well, which means that it will be more difficult to source them. And foreskin samples do eventually run out and need to be replaced. But Fitzpatrick says that although you can use technology to make the cell cultures from scratch, without foreskins, the process is "much more expensive."

Quote:

Things have changed from the time when using foreskins was an objection-free endeavour. In fact, many websites are now dedicated to the preservation of baby foreskins, and long streams of discussion on mothering websites argue against the use of baby skin for cosmetics purposes. Vancouver is home to the Association for Genital Integrity whose mandate is to end male circumcision.

Quote:

Neocutis is another face cream -- but this one uses cells grown from a terminated fetus to make their product, something they document on their website. Neocutis declined The Tyee's request for an interview.
Dr. Nikhil Mehta, the director of product development for SkinMedica, talked to The Tyee about his opinion of Neocutis, their competitor. "They are actually taking cells, literally chopping up the cells, and putting them in cream."

Another page on the Neocutis website describes how they harvested the tissue of a terminated two-month-old fetus, "in the period of scarless wound healing." It is out of this tissue that they developed the cell culture used in creating their special "bio restorative skin cream" with their patented secret ingredient.

Sorry about so many quotes. The article was interesting. I had heard of companies using terminated fetuses before but not foreskins, for facial cream. I think there was a hospital over in Europe who had an unusually high rate of stillborns. Apparently the babies were healthy before labor so there were questions as to why it was happening. Some of the parents and I think the reporter thought the babies were being killed for this. (I think thats what the article I had read said but don't quote me on it.)

selkie · #2 4th-June-2007

OK so I found the article. I had posted it on another forum, however the link to the original site is dead.

Quote:

The babies who are murdered to order
The plastic bag looks as if it contains meat. But then a right leg is taken from it and placed surgically on the morgue table, followed by the left one. Then the torso. The head follows, a gaping cavity where the brain used to be.

But it is only when the gloved hand of the pathologist examines the tiny fingers of a baby aged about 30 weeks that the full horror of what I am witnessing sinks in.

This shocking scene was captured on video at post-mortem examinations carried out on behalf of Ukrainian mothers who claim their babies were stolen from them at birth.

The film was shown to me by an incredibly brave charity worker called Tatyana Zhakarova, who represents up to 300 families who believe their healthy babies were deliberately targeted at a maternity hospital in the Ukraine's most easterly city of Kharkiv.

The babies, believes Tatyana, were taken at birth to have their organs and stem cells harvested as part of a sickening but highly lucrative international trade.

Certainly, the Ukraine has become the main supplier of the global stem cell trade.

Officially, the cells are taken from aborted foetuses with the mothers' consent, but according to Tatyana, there could also be hundreds of babies stolen to order, to feed demand for stem cells from around the world.

Can she be right? Alarmed by her claims, I decided to launch my own investigations for a special BBC report, to be broadcast tomorrow.

My inquiries took me around the world, from a private clinic in the Caribbean to the desolate back streets of the Ukraine. What I uncovered is a disturbing tale involving claims of murder, conspiracy . . . and a sickening new beauty treatment.

The first hint I had of these allegations arose months ago during a conversation with one of the UK's foremost experts on stem cell research.

Dr Stephen Minger, from Kings College, London, is a distinguished medical researcher who believes stem cells hold the key to finding a cure for some of our major diseases.

These tiny cells, which first divide within an embryo, have the ability to transform themselves into any type of tissue. But it's their potential as a future treatment for conditions such as muscular dystrophy and Parkinson's disease that really excites Dr Minger.

He is one of many reputable experts who fear their research into this field is being given a bad name by companies making a fast buck out of untested stem cell therapies.

Dr Minger told me he found out about the trade in stem cells from aborted Ukrainian foetuses two years ago, when he was invited to meet doctors from a controversial clinic in Barbados. called the Institute For Regenerative Medicine (IRM), the firm wanted Dr Minger to lend his endorsement to its therapies.

The firm's website boasts IRM is "dedicated to excellence in stem cell therapy for the remediation of diseases resulting from tissue damage and/or the effects of aging". But its claims are treated with scepticism by experts.

The clinic's method of treatment involves injecting patients with stem cells taken from babies aborted between seven and ten weeks old.

It is a technique, says Dr Minger, that has no credible research to back it up, and that raises disturbing questions about how the cells have been 'harvested'.

"The problem is, I am not sure how the cells are prepared," he says. "A six-week-old embryo can be just 1cm from head to foot, so it's difficult to dissect tissue from it. They may just homogenise the whole embryo." That's a polite way of saying that the aborted babies could have been liquidised.

Dr Minger was especially troubled that as well as offering unproven therapy to patients with degenerative diseases - at up to £10,000 a time - the clinic was running a lucrative sideline in offering stem cell treatments to reverse the effects of ageing.

The firm boasts that such treatment can lead to everything from improved fitness and a better sex life to greater mental capacity and enhanced sleep patterns.

"I find it very distasteful that they are used for beauty treatments," says Dr Minger. "As far as I can tell from what's been published, a lot of people go to this clinic in Barbados feeling a bit run down, or that their skin has just lost some elasticity, and they are getting 'smoothies' or perk-me-ups."

The stem cells used in these techniques are bought by IRM from the Ukraine. They are said to be taken from aborted foetuses, with the mothers' consent. But could there be a link with the Ukrainian mothers who believe their babies were deliberately taken from them?

I travelled to Barbados to speak to one of IRM's senior doctors, Shami Ramesh.

Initially, I feared my journey was in vain. As I approached the 170-year-old colonial building where the clinic is based, I found the gates were padlocked - I was told by Dr Ramesh that I would have to come back in January.

But eventually I managed to persuade him to come to my hotel, where he said he could show me evidence of two studies that proved the treatments work.

This "proof" turned out to be one study of a single patient with motor neurone disease and another of eight cardiac patients. The numbers were too small for proper analysis and the data had not been published in any reputable peer-reviewed journal.

But Dr Ramesh's faith in the treatment was striking. "Foetal stem cells work," he said. "If patients were not getting value for money they would not be coming back to us for second and third infusions."

Then our conversation turned to the main part of my inquiry: how could he be certain the stem cells the clinic was using had indeed come only from aborted foetuses in the Ukraine - a country where there's very little regulation over issues like consent from donors.

Was it possible that the cells had, in fact, been harvested from fullterm babies without any consent from the parents?

Dr Ramesh denied any knowledge of babies being sacrificed for stem cells. He said he had faith in the Institute of Cryobiology in Kharkiv, the source of the stem cells used by the Barbados clinic, but added that "maybe in the future we will go and check it out".

I decided to travel to the Ukraine myself to see what sort of guarantee the Institute could offer about the source of its stem cells.

Once there, I made several attempts to interview the head of the Institute, Dr Valentin Greshenko, to put my concerns to him, but he refused. So my inquiries took me instead to Maternity Hospital Number Six, which stands in what my translator told me nervously was the "criminal area" of Kharkiv.

It was at this hospital, in 2002, that a young woman called Svetlana Plusikova gave birth to a baby girl. The 26-year-old agreed to meet me in a derelict fairground nearby, set in a leafless forest. She was too scared for me to come to her workplace.

Svetlana told me that after a relatively straightforward pregnancy, she gave birth without any complication. "It happened very, very quickly - the doctors didn't say anything."

It was only much later that she was informed the child had been stillborn. "They told me my child had already been dead inside me for five months."

Svetlana was unconvinced. Surely if her baby had been dead for so long, she would have suffered a miscarriage. And why was the dead infant not shown to her? It had been whisked away so quickly she didn't even have a chance to hear if it cried.

She has her own theories as to what happened. "I think she was stolen. If she was dead I should have been allowed to see her. I think a lot of young mothers like me lost their children, but right now nobody turns to the police."

Certainly, Svetlana is not alone in her suspicions. I met Dimitry and Olena Stulnev in their two-room flat nearby. I arrived during a power cut and started to interview them by candlelight. There, with tears running down her face, Olena told me about her own experience in Maternity Hospital Number Six.

"I gave birth to a healthy girl," Olena told me. "She was crying and moving her hands and legs. I was shown the baby. After that the girl was taken away. They told me everything was OK and I could see her the next day."

But that never happened. Olena was told the following day that her baby had died. But when she asked what had caused the death, the answers were inconsistent. "They told me three stories. One, she didn't have enough air to breathe; two, the lungs didn't open; and three, that her heart failed."

The couple tried in vain to find out what really happened, but the more they investigated, the firmer the doors were shut in their faces.

So she contacted a charity campaigner named Tatyana Zhakarova, from the Federation Of Families With Many Children, who took up the case on her behalf.

Tatyana discovered many more infants had died at the hospital in similarly odd circumstances. And after intensive lobbying, the authorities eventually agreed to have the tiny bodies of around 30 babies exhumed and examined.

Tatyana showed me the video she had been allowed to record of the post-mortem examinations that followed. The gruesome film shows the carcasses of babies, some of whom were full-term, with their organs and brains missing. Neurones in infants' brain are a rich source of stem cells.

Another body shown in the video is so badly dismembered it has to be put together piece by piece, like a jigsaw. Dismemberment is not standard autopsy practice and could, according to experts, indicate stem cells were harvested from bone marrow.

The post-mortem examination conclusions were profoundly disturbing. But Tatyana is now living in fear that the authorities are trying to silence her.

Her 20-year-old son went missing in October in mysterious circumstances, and she fears he may have been killed in revenge for her campaign to uncover the truth.

The Ukrainian authorities deny any conspiracy and refute claims that there is a trade in stem cells taken from stolen babies.

However, alarmed by the whole stem cell issue, the Council Of Europe is now carrying out its own investigation into the Ukrainian mothers' claims.

The Council's interim report talks of a "culture of trafficking of children snatched at birth and a wall of silence from hospital staff upwards over their fate".

As part of the second stage of the inquiry, the council will no doubt want to talk in detail to staff at Maternity Hospital Number Six. But whether they will get any answers is another matter - as I discovered when I tried to speak to the hospital authorities myself.

It was a grim scene. As I waited for hours at Maternity Hospital Number Six, heavily pregnant women in maternity smocks wandered past me in its dark corridors, along with the occasional elderly midwife.

Paint was peeling off the walls and there was a strong smell of antiseptic. Eventually, I was granted five minutes with the chief doctor, Larysa Nazarenko.

She was visibly uncomfortable as I set up my camera - her eyelids blinking rapidly as she stood behind her desk. "The children are not lost," she told me. "They are not stolen - that's just somebody else's illusion."

Who, she asked, had put these ideas in this young mother's head?

"It's about money," I said, "about stem cells. About Westerners paying a lot of money for stem cells from babies. And claims that cells from their brains are taken for treatment by various organisations."

"There is no such therapy," she said. "No work in this hospital is connected with the use of cells. This is the wrong address. I deny everything." Then I was ordered to leave.

Dr Nazarenko may have to spare more time to speak to Council Of Europe officials in February, when they will return to Kharkiv to continue their investigation.

The wall of silence is crumbling. And it may yet reveal a very ugly side to the global beauty business.

Tyrael · #3 4th-June-2007

For males who've lost their foreskin: that's where much of it goes, to vanity products.

I support all stem cell research. However as with foreskin and stem cell research; it should originate from donors who have personally given their consent and not be decided by others for them.

Marx · #4 4th-June-2007

I recall reading similar previously, but damn, selkie... the fullness of this..

**the sad geek** · #5 4th-June-2007

This reminds me of that episode of Babylon 5, "Deathwalker", where a genocidal warlord discovers the cure for mortality, the essence of which can only be synthesized by destroying another living being.

Celtic Druid · #6 4th-August-2007

Quote:

One of the most publicized examples of the foreskin-for-sale trend involves a skin cream that has been promoted by none other than Oprah Winfrey. SkinMedica'sa face cream, which costs over $100 US for a 0.63 oz bottle, is used by many high-profile celebrities (such as Winfrey and Barbara Walters) as an alternative to cosmetic surgery. Winfrey has promoted the SkinMedica product several times on her show, and her website, which raves, there's "a new product that boosts collagen production and can rejuvenate skin called TNS Recovery Complex. TNS is comprised from six natural human growth factors found in normal healthy skin...the factors are engineered from human foreskin!"

The nauseating irony of this! Pig Winfrey incessantly denounces female circumcision as being abhorrent and a crime (yes, totally agreed.) However, she never does so regarding male circumcision. Telling, isn't it! Yet her contemptible (fashionable) animosity for men is so entrenched, she "knowingly and hypocritically" slaps this foreskin-cream on her fat ugly face with the full knowledge it's 'rejuvenating' properties are benefitted from the butchered foreskins of baby boys.

The further irony is, many of these foreskins come from African boys. Then this piece of shit openly promotes this product on her show? To do so, even if there is a suspicion regarding it's properties is deplorable. But to do so when the evidence is overwhelming, is pure evil. Furthermore, much of the profits go towards funding her worldwide misandry machine - Harpo Productions. Harpo is Oprah spelled backwards, see what a talented turd she is?

At what cost must humanity pay, to quench the voracious thirst of western womens vanity and gargantuan ego?

How about a yearly allocation of x number of foreskins to those women who can afford it, guaranteed by the setting up of "foreskin farms." Babies raised solely for harvesting foreskins (and anything else profitable), then dispatched with, like yesterdays rubbish. Exaggeration? Not really, just an extrapolation of the reality brought to an industrial scale.

With such an arrangement, would satisfy the vanity of women, whilst simultaneously fulfilling the ghoulish fanatical obsession of fems for their daily fix of male genital mutilation.

Billy · #7 4th-August-2007

Most everyone is aware that placenta or afterbirth is used in cosmetics.
Not much diffence in my opinion. But advertising it as some kind of anti-male product woud be wrong.

But Neocutis another face cream with cells grown from a terminated fetus is disgusting.

Celtic Druid · #8 4th-August-2007

Quote:

Originally Posted by Billy

Most everyone is aware that placenta or afterbirth is used in cosmetics.
Not much diffence in my opinion.

No difference?

The placenta and afterbirth are by-products of a 'live' birth. No live entity is harmed or mutilated in the process.

The use of these 'naturally' discarded by-products cannot be confused, with the rights of a male child who is "entitled" to retain all the bodily parts God/nature provided him with.

To claim the slicing off of a boys foreskin (sometimes within a few days/weeks of birth) for example: within Jewish religion and doctrine, mostly without a anesthesthetic. Strapped into a plastic board, which has four straps, two for the feet and two for the hands (reminiscent of torture chambers) bears no DIFFERENCE brother?

Quote:

But Neocutis another face cream with cells grown from a terminated fetus is disgusting

Interesting, you show more concern for a terminated foetus, than for the rights of a "live" baby boy to retain his foreskin. Confusing and contradictory?

Billy · #9 4th-August-2007

As mentioned on another thread I don't have a problem with Jewish circumcism. I am not Jewish and was circumcised and it had no harmful effects on me. I dont even remember it even. My sons were also circumcised although it was not required but because all our Fathers had been. It took about 10 minutes and they brought the children out and they were not showing signs of pain.

Life is full of aches and pains and it's possible that the process actually desensitized the boys to pain later on and makes them tougher. Because neither of my boys seemed to whine much when they got hurt growing up.
Living in this matriarchy has everyone questioning everything that is offensive to some and so many people telling others how they should live and behave. Are we becoming a bunch of touchy-feely girly men?
If God commanded the proceedure for Jewish boys then I don't believe it could be that harmful. I realize now it wasn't required for gentiles.