Airedale is one of four Yorkshire NHS trusts alerted by regulators

More than 1,000 body parts were plundered by gangs in New York and then sold for transplants, it is claimed.

Biomedical Tissue Services, the firm at the centre of the scandal, exported 77 body parts to the UK last year.

Airedale Hospital near Keighley said it bought two products from the company that were used in a hip operation.

Medical director Dr Richard Pope said: "As soon as we received the directive advising us of the recall of those products, they were not used in the trust.

[We were] assured the manufacturers had used all the appropriate screening and processing steps, including sterilisation, and that any risk was negligible Dr Richard Pope, Airedale Hospital

"We would reassure our patients that we have already identified the one isolated case in which 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 was negligible."

Twenty NHS trusts which are believed to have received body parts from the company were alerted to the problem by the MHRA.

They include two other Yorkshire NHS trusts - Doncaster & Bassetlaw and Sheffield Teaching Hospitals.

Late last year, the US Food and Drug Administration ordered a recall of the potentially tainted products and warned that many patients could have been exposed to HIV and other diseases, but insisted the risk of infection was minimal.

Four charged

New York investigators say death certificates were doctored to make it appear the dead were younger and healthier than they actually were.

Four people have pleaded not guilty to criminal charges in relation to the scandal.

A spokeswoman for the MHRA said: "It's not to say that the 77 body parts that were brought in came from stolen cadavers or were infected.

"But they did come from Biomedical Tissue Services and we alerted hospitals of this earlier in the year."

She added it was up to individual doctors to decide what to do with regard to removing the implants or deciding it was less risk to leave them in.