Surgeons in Airedale unwittingly used potentially contaminated body parts, allegedly stolen from dead Americans, to implant into a patient.

Bosses at Airedale NHS Trust confirmed yesterday one patient, who underwent two procedures using potentially contaminated bones, was contacted last year when a scandal involving US company BioMedical Tissue Services came to light.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) shut down the New Jersey-based company after it was found to be harvesting tissues from corpses in US funeral parlours without the deceased's consent and without adequate checks to ensure the bodies were free of disease.

Caught up in the scandal was veteran broadcaster Alistair Cooke, whose Letter from America ran on BBC radio for 58 years. Although Mr Cooke died from cancer at the age of 95, his bones were allegedly stolen and sold by BioMedical Tissue Services.

The FDA ordered a recall of the potentially tainted products and warned that patients could have been exposed to HIV and other diseases such as hepatitis and syphilis, but insisted the risk of infection was minimal.

The Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency, the agency responsible for ensuring the safety of medical treatments in the UK, confirmed that for some the recall came too late and 77 bone products had been grafted on to the hips and jaws of British patients - including one in Airedale.

The Agency wrote to the medical directors and chief executives of all trusts and private hospitals in England and Wales who had received affected tissue to clarify the risk.

One such letter was sent to Airedale NHS Trust, which runs Airedale General Hospital, near Steeton, and which had bought bone from the company to be grafted on to patients needing hip or jaw operations.

Dr Richard Pope, Medical Director for Airedale NHS Trust, said: "As soon as we received the directive advising us of the recall of those products, they were not used in the Trust.

"We would reassure our patients that we have already identified the one isolated case where the bone graft products were used before the recall was made.

"That patient was informed last year at the time of the recall.

"Patient safety is our utmost priority and the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Authority (MHRA) has assured us that the manufacturers had already used all the appropriate screening and processing steps, including sterilisation, and that any risk therefore was negligible."

e-mail: claire.lomax @bradford.newsquest.co.uk