Recent reports explore how a lack of global regulation and surging demand for remains is driving the unauthorized selling of human parts:

In the Ukraine, for example, the security service believes that bodies passing through a morgue in the Nikolaev district, the gritty shipbuilding region located near the Black Sea, may have been feeding the trade, leaving behind what investigators described as potentially dozens of “human sock puppets” — corpses stripped of their reusable parts. Industry officials argue that such alleged abuses are rare, and that the industry operates safely and responsibly.

Demand is fueled by a startlingly broad range of uses: