AMID the row over organs being removed from the bodies of children who died at the leading North West children's hospital at Alder Hey, Liverpool, the city's coroner, Andr Rebello, likens the doctors responsible to the early 19th-century body snatchers, Burke and Hare.

It is an analogy that will upset many parents in the region, who put their trust in the medical profession and in this hospital, but Mr Rebello - known for his high level of commitment to his duty when he was a coroner here in East Lancashire - is right to draw attention in this way to this disturbing practice, for it deserves the same level of condemnation.

Indeed, it may merit more.

For when the notorious Burke and Hare were robbing graves, their ghoulish plunder was used by anatomists to further medical knowledge, ultimately for the benefit of all society.

But can that be said of what has happened at Alder Hey when, having already admitted to having collected the hearts of more than 2,000 children, the hospital discovered it had stored another 850 organs of which neither doctors nor parents were aware?

It is shocking enough - and for the families involved a harrowing heaping of grief upon grief - that organs of dead children were being routinely removed without their parents consenting or, if they had, being fully aware of the fact. But it is even more dreadful if, as it seems, this was being done for no purpose other than storing them and forgetting about them.

Then, even the utilitarian excuse of a greater good being served is lost.

Additionally, as it has been disclosed at the current public inquiry into the deaths of babies in heart surgery at Bristol Royal Infirmary that a number of hospitals routinely retained hearts and other organs for research, it is evident that a national inquiry into these practices is necessary.

There need to be strict rules to ensure that no removal happens without full consent and none occurs for no good reason.

If, in opening an inquest into the death of one child whose organs were removed at Alder Hey without her family's knowledge and in joining, with his stinging censure, in the demand for an inquiry, Mr Rebello has triggered such reforms, he will once more have lived up to his duty.

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