NEW YORK (AP) – Patricia Battisti had thought her back surgery in early 2005 was routine. A letter from her hospital nearly a year later made it clear she was wrong.

Battisti was informed that donated human tissue used in her operation could have been infected with a variety of viruses – fallout from an alleged scheme to steal body parts.

The Long Island woman now claims she contracted syphilis and is pursuing a lawsuit. The hospital adamantly denies the allegation, but the case is a sign that the gruesome body parts scandal will have a far-flung subplot involving civil litigation.

“I just want answers,” Battisti, 41, a single mother of four, said earlier this week outside court. “I had the operation to feel better, not get sick.”

Battisti joins a burgeoning list of potential victims of a scam hatched in the back rooms of Brooklyn funeral parlors.

Authorities believe two men paid off funeral homes so they could harvest bone and skin from the dead without their families’ knowledge. Worse, some body parts came from elderly people who died of cancer and possibly from victims of infectious diseases – a fact disguised by doctored paperwork that indicated they had been younger and healthier.

The Brooklyn district attorney’s office has opened a criminal case focusing on scores of funeral homes in the New York City area and hundreds of looted bodies, including that of famed British broadcaster Alistair Cooke. At the same time, the Food and Drug Administration has sought to retrace the path of an untold number of tissue products that were derived from the stolen body parts and sold to medical facilities across the country and parts of Canada.

In a Jan. 16 letter to the FDA, Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., suggested there had been a breakdown in federal oversight, and urged the agency to revise its regulations “to immediately prevent further instances of contaminated transplants.” He unveiled legislation on Monday that would ban tissue procurement from funeral homes and force the FDA to tighten regulations.

Both the FDA and hospital officials, while suggesting certain patients should get tested for viruses as a precaution, insisted the risk of becoming ill from tainted tissue was minuscule. But some of those patients aren’t comforted, said Battisti’s attorney, Jeffrey S. Lisabeth.

“It’s a bolt from the blue for most of these people,” he said. “It really freaks them out.”

Also disturbed are families who recently learned of evidence that their dead relatives were secretly carved up before being buried or cremated.

A suit filed in Brooklyn accused a now-defunct New Jersey tissue bank, Biomedical Tissue Services, of pilfering parts from a 43-year-old woman who died of ovarian cancer in 2003. The business allegedly forged a signature on a consent form, and listed the cause of death as head trauma.

“It was never the intention of the decedents to give body parts,” said Sanford Rubenstein, an attorney for the woman’s family. “No one ever even asked.”

In the Cooke case, authorities found paperwork indicating his bones had been removed by the same tissue bank before he was cremated. Cooke, best known as the host of PBS’s “Masterpiece Theatre,” died from cancer last year at 95 in Manhattan, but authorities say documents listed his cause of death to heart attack and lowered his age to 85.

The operators of the tissue bank have denied any wrongdoing.

Battisti’s ordeal began in December, when North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System warned her and 41 other patients that they were at risk for HIV, hepatitis B and C and syphilis. Letters explained that its hospitals had used tissue products for surgical repairs derived from body parts that were harvested without proper permission or medical safeguards.

During a court hearing where a judge ordered a hospital to produce records about the Battisti case, Lisabeth accused doctors of failing to take proper precautions before implanting donated bone in Battisti’s back to relieve pain from a car accident injury. The lawyer said a recent blood test indicated his client had been exposed to syphilis; the results of further tests were pending.

The hospital’s attorney, Anthony Sola, argued the tissue banks were responsible for screening and sterilizing their products, which arrive at hospitals ready for use in sealed containers. He also claimed anyone getting syphilis from a bone graft would be “a medical first.”

Unfounded allegations, he warned, have the potential to “create undue fear in patients who need treatment.”

But the Battisti case – and others like it – appear unlikely to go away. Both Lisabeth and Rubenstein said they have been contacted by other lawyers and possible victims nationwide.

“The number of potential plaintiffs is virtually limitless,” Lisabeth said.