Two big Dutch hospitals have said they will stop importing human body parts for teaching purposes from two US firms on ethical grounds, news agency Reuters said at the weekend.

Amsterdam’s AMC teaching hospital and the Erasmus medical centre in Rotterdam have been importing body parts for 10 years, but have decided to stop doing so because of investigations by US officials into the body brokers they had been using, Reuters said.

One, MedCure, is under FBI investigation for potentially selling tainted body parts in Canada and Hong Kong, and the other, Science Care, recruited donors from hospices and retirement facilities, Reuters said.

In the Netherlands, people who donate their bodies to research do not get paid. In the United States, many brokers offer donor families free cremation in return for donating a body – a potential saving of up to $1,000, Reuters said.

Freek Dikkers, the professor of ear, nose and throat medicine at the AMC told Reuters soliciting donors at hospices and old age homes and earning millions from the trade is ‘unacceptable’.