EFE.- Surgeons at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago performed a double lung transplant to a Covid-19 patient with organs from a donor who had the disease, was cured and later died in an accident.
As reported by the hospital this Friday in a statement, the recipient is a Illinois health worker, age 60, who was diagnosed in May 2020 and suffered permanent damage to his lungs.
The donor had survived the virus after having mild to moderate symptoms, and his death was not related to Covid-19. “His lungs were not permanently damaged by the virus, making them viable for transplantation”says the statement.
“This is a milestone for lung transplantation,” said Dr. Ankit Bharat, chief of thoracic surgery and surgical director of the Northwestern Medicine Healthcare Provider Network Lung Transplant Program, who performed the procedure. .
Said to date 30 million Americans have had Covid-19 and many of them are registered organ donors. “If we tell them that not only because they had Covid-19 in the past, we will drastically reduce the pool of donors and there is already a large supply and demand gap,” he said.
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“We will have a huge problem on our hands if Americans cannot donate their organs after having a mild to moderate case of Covid-19,” he added.
Bharat reported that to make sure that the donor had cleared the virus from their body, the transplant team performed a test that examines the donor’s lung fluid. This same test has been performed prior to every lung transplant procedure at Northwestern Memorial during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The team also performs a lung biopsy in the operating room to make sure there is no permanent damage to the donor’s lung.
“Our first ‘covid to covid’ patient received beautiful and healthy lungs and continues to recover at an optimal rate, “said the doctor.
The recipient, who was not publicly identified and underwent the procedure in February, is one of the first known survivors of Covid-19 in the United States to receive lungs from a donor who recovered from the virus.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, surgeons Northwestern have performed 14 double lung transplants in survivors of Covid-19, the most of any hospital in the world. The first was in June 2020 to a Hispanic patient, Mayra Ramírez, 28.
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