Bobi Milner: "I thought, 'Oh, my God, what's going to happen to me?' "

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CHICAGO — Every year more than 1 million Americans have medical procedures that use bone or other tissue from a cadaver — like disc replacements or dental implants.

But what if the donated tissue came from someone who died of cancer? Or AIDS? Or hepatitis?

That worry caused by a ghoulish scandal in the body- parts business has led to distress for hundreds of people, and some prospective patients are now reconsidering how they want their surgeries done.

Experts familiar with the situation say patients' chances of getting a disease from the suspect tissue are small, but doctors are urging them to be tested.

"This is diabolical … if what has been alleged has been done," said Dr. Stephen Pineda, an orthopedic surgeon in Springfield, Ill. "What it does to the whole public perception of bone and all other grafts can be catastrophic."

Investigators are trying to determine if a New Jersey company, Biomedical Tissue Services of Fort Lee, sold bone and tissue illegally obtained from corpses that were too old, sick or otherwise ineligible to be donors. The company closed last month.

The Food and Drug Administration and federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say the risk of infection is low but unknown. So dozens of hospitals have contacted hundreds of patients around the country who got body parts traced to the company between early 2004 and September 2005. They are being offered testing for AIDS, hepatitis and syphilis.

Those are the three illnesses that the FDA requires donor tissue to be tested for — singled out because they cause long-lasting infections that pose a greater risk of transmission through transplanted tissue than short-lived infections.

But some patients worry about tissue or bone from bodies weakened by age or by cancer and other ailments. Doctors concede that's theoretically possible but unlikely to cause problems with the grafts.

Carol Yates, 47, of Marion, Ohio, is among patients advised to get tested and has set up a Web site to give recipients of the suspect tissue a chance to share concerns with others.

Yates said her doctor told her in December that Biomedical Tissue Services bone was used in her neck surgery a year ago.

"All it's done is caused me a lot of worry," Yates said. "I haven't taken the test yet. If it came back positive, I couldn't handle that."

Unused body parts linked to the case have been recalled. Companies that process the tissue for medical use are required to test and sterilize it. But still, some patients awaiting operations are scared.

In the past week, two of Pineda's patients have refused donor parts and want to use their own bone. It's a riskier, costlier and more painful option that Pineda said most patients used to shun. He calls their reaction "completely understandable."

Bobi Milner, a Springfield, Ill., woman who had surgery last year to fix a disc in her spine, learned last month her graft came from suspect bone.

Her infectious-disease tests came back negative, and Milner said she didn't freak out until she read a local newspaper article detailing the scam's scope. Unwitting donors included former "Masterpiece Theater" host Alistair Cooke, who died of cancer at age 95 in 2004.

"That's when I realized what the magnitude was," said Milner, 41. "I cried and sobbed the rest of the day. I thought, 'Oh, my God, what's going to happen to me?' "