AMERICA’S body parts scandal deepened yesterday with the disclosure that the US military had purchased bodies donated “to science” to blow up in landmine experiments.

A medical school at Tulane University has suspended its dealings with a body-broker after discovering that he sold some of its surplus cadavers to the US Army, which used them in tests of anti-mine footwear.

The New Orleans institution receives up to 150 bodies a year as part of its “willed body” programme, but needs only 40 to 45 for its classes.

Chuck Dasey, a spokesman for the US Army Medical Research and Material Command, said that the military had purchased six or seven bodies for use in field tests of protective footwear.

“You cause the cadaver to be near an explosion that is intended to mimic a landmine explosion on a battlefield or in a minefield,” he said. “The purpose of the project was to evaluate available footwear to see if their use would reduce the severity of injury.”

The revelations heightened public concern about the fate of donated bodies after the arrests of the head of the nation’s oldest “willed body programme” and a suspected middleman for allegedly trafficking in stolen body parts.

Henry Reid, director of the programme at the University of California in Los Angeles, and Ernest Nelson, the alleged middleman, are accused of selling body parts from the university’s freezers for profit.Documents indicate that Mr Reid oversaw the sale of 496 bodies for $704,600 (£407,000) over six years.

The arrests, which have prompted lawsuits and an independent investigation, are the latest in a string of cases that raise questions about America’s loosely regulated market for body parts.

Last year, the owner of a California crematorium was sentenced to 20 years in prison after he admitted removing heads, knees, spines and other parts from 133 corpses and selling them to research companies.

A year earlier, the head of the cadaver programme at the University of Texas medical school was fired amid allegations that he had made more than $4,000 (£2,300) selling fingernails and toenails to a pharmaceutical company.

In 1999, the director of the willed body programme at another branch of the University of California was dismissed after an audit found that he had sold six spines for $5,000 (£2,890). The university said later that it was unable to account for hundreds of bodies that had been donated to it.

The bodies obtained by the US Army from Tulane were handled by a firm run by a New York-based funeral director called National Anatomical Service, which transports about 800 corpses a year between institutions. The company says that it picked up the bodies in New Orleans and transported them in a refrigerated vehicle to several sites in Texas, and then retrieved them after they had been used and arranged for them to be cre mated.

John Vincent Scalia, the company founder, told The Times-Picayune newspaper in New Orleans that the work was “so labour intensive that we have turned down other contracts with the army”.

The transaction became public when the author of a forthcoming book on the body parts trade reported in Harper’s Magazine that the broker had paid $7,000 (£4,050) to the university for the seven bodies and sold them to the military for almost $30,000 (£17,340).

Mary Bitner Anderson, co-director of Tulane’s body donor programme, told The Times-Picayune that she was concerned that the broker was making a big profit by handling cadavers donated to the university.

Mr Dasey, the US army spokesman, said that the military had broken no laws and defended its landmine research. “There are a lot of US and probably British soldiers right now who are recovering in hospitals from landmine injuries,” he said. “We believe that the medical research that helps us to develop more effective equipment in limiting these injuries is very legitimate research.”

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