The traveling exhibitions of human bodies have attracted little attention from federal or state regulators in the few years that they have been touring the United States. Neither health nor customs officials consider the remains to be cadavers, which would require more stringent inspection.

An official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention decided several years ago that there was no public health threat, so that agency hasn't been involved.

Dr. Stephen Ostroff remembers receiving an e-mail message about four years ago when he was deputy director of infectious disease at the CDC offices in Atlanta. Someone wanted to know if plastinated bodies posed a health risk. It was a new one on Ostroff, who did some research.

"I remember looking at the material and saying I couldn't imagine how it possibly could, understanding how the bodies were prepared," Ostroff said in a phone interview earlier this month. "It was inconceivable any organism that could pose a public health threat could survive."

Dave Daigle, deputy director of media relations at the CDC, said he recalls seeing the unusual email when it arrived in Ostroff's office that day. Daigle thinks that it came from a shipper in San Francisco who wanted to know if the CDC should be involved. He said Ostroff checked with the quarantine division, which concurred that these were not human remains.

Ostroff and Daigle say the question never came up again, as far as they know. Ostroff left the agency in 2005 and is now the state epidemiologist in Pennsylvania, where "Bodies ... The Exhibition" has settled in for its fall run in Pittsburgh after leaving Durham.

Acting on an inquiry prompted by Cary resident Sarah Redpath, North Carolina's state epidemiologist conferred with the communicable disease division, the state medical examiner's office and his own legal department. All concurred there was no health threat.

Paul Harris of the N.C. Board of Funeral Services said last week he would discuss with his board proposed legislation Redpath is drafting to crack down on the exhibitions. Harris said there should be laws regulating bodies that come into this country, regardless of how they are preserved.

"Somebody at some level of government ought to be able to look at a death certificate, a statement from an embalmer, donation documents," Harris said. "That's a reasonable standard to apply."

U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents in ports where the exhibitions have arrived have considered them as standard trade. At least one of the companies involved in the business listed its bodies on a customs form as "teaching models."

Joel Paul, an international customs law professor in San Francisco, contends that a product can't be called something different just because it has been reconfigured. In other words, a body is still a body even if it has been plastinated.