Posted on 01/18/2002 9:51:02 AM PST by Interloper
Bin Laden 'may have died from kidney ailment'
Pakistan's president believes Osama bin Laden may have died from a kidney ailment.
General Pervez Musharraf told CNN that bin Laden may have died because he was unable to get treatment during the US bombing campaign.
Musharraf did not indicate whether he had intelligence reports to back up his suspicions. He added that, if bin Laden is still alive, he is still in Afghanistan.
Musharraf said: "I think now, frankly, he is dead for the reason that he is a patient, a kidney patient.
"We know that he donated two dialysis machines into Afghanistan. One was specifically for his own personal use."
Bin Laden last appeared in a video tape broadcast on December 26 by the Arabic language television station Al-Jazeera, during which he praised the perpetrators of the September 11 attacks.
Bin Laden looked pale and gaunt. He occasionally smiled as he spoke and, although clearly thinner than in past tapes, his voice was strong and slightly raspy.
Musharraf added: "I don't know if he has been getting all that treatment in Afghanistan now. And the photographs that have been shown of him on television show him extremely weak."
Last month, Musharraf told Chinese television there was a "great possibility" that bin Laden was dead.
He suggested that bin Laden could have been killed in the US bombing of the Tora-Bora camp in eastern Afghanistan. A search of the area by U.S. special forces turned up no trace of bin Laden.
Story filed: 18:41 Friday 18th January 2002
SHOW ME...the Body!!
FReegards...MUD
Musharraf did not indicate whether he had intelligence reports to back up his suspicions. He added that, if bin Laden is still alive, he is still in Afghanistan.
Musharraf said: "I think now, frankly, he is dead for the reason that he is a patient, a kidney patient.
"We know that he donated two dialysis machines into Afghanistan. One was specifically for his own personal use."
Don't ya just Love irony?
Mayo Clinic
9-Feb-01
New Kidney Transplant Procedure
Library: MED
Keywords: MEDICAL HEALTH KIDNEY TRANSPLANTATION
Description: A team of Mayo Clinic kidney transplant specialists has developed a new kidney transplant procedure that could make transplants possible for thousands of people who previously were unlikely to have a successful transplant.
ROCHESTER, MINN. -- A team of Mayo Clinic kidney transplant specialists has developed a new kidney transplant procedure that could make transplants possible for thousands of people who previously were unlikely to have a successful transplant.
The advancement, called positive crossmatch transplants, greatly reduces the chance of organ rejection in patients with elevated antibody levels. Previously, these elevated antibody levels made tissue rejection almost certain.
Mayo Clinic is one of three medical centers in the United States that offer this procedure.
About 45,000 people are waiting for a cadaver kidney in the United States; about 8,000 kidneys are available every year.
About 7,000 of those waiting are affected by this elevated antibody level. "The only option available for these people was to stay on dialysis," says Mark Stegall, M.D., a Mayo Clinic kidney and pancreas transplantation surgeon. "It was very unlikely they would ever get a transplant."
Dialysis works like an artificial kidney. It prolongs life but it is not ideal. Three times a week for four hours at a stretch, patients hook up to a machine that removes waste fluids and regulates the body's chemical and blood
balances.
Physicians aren't certain what causes patients to have elevated antibody levels that make traditional transplants likely to fail. Many of those with elevated antibody levels have had a previous failed kidney transplant. Others have had multiple pregnancies or multiple blood transfusions. Many are young or middle-aged adults who are otherwise healthy.
Improved results by removing antibodies
Prior to a positive crossmatch transplant, patients undergo a dialysis-like process called plasmapheresis, where the antibodies that cause tissue rejection are removed. The risk of rejection is also reduced by new medicines that specifically target cells that make the antibodies and removing the patient''s spleen which is responsible for antibody production.
The positive crossmatch process is similar to the process used for ABO-incompatible living-donor kidney transplants -- another recent advancement in transplants -- where patients can receive kidneys from living donors with blood types different from their own.
"With positive crossmatch transplants, we are taking it a step further, making it possible for the patients to accept different tissue types in addition to different blood types," says Dr. Stegall.
So far, Mayo Clinic surgeons have performed 20 ABO-incompatible kidney transplants and four positive crossmatch kidney transplants.
"The results and recovery time for both positive crossmatch and ABO-incompatible transplants are similar to other living-donor kidney transplants," says Dr. Stegall. "That's remarkable, especially for the positive crossmatch patients. Before this, they didn¥t have the option of a transplant."
Living donors are used for both ABO-incompatible and positive crossmatch transplants. About 150 of the 200 kidney transplants performed this year at Mayo Clinic will use living donors.
Using living donors offers many benefits: a shorter waiting time for transplants; kidneys can be tested prior to transplant; they routinely function immediately while cadaver kidneys may take several weeks to work; and they typically last much longer than kidneys from cadavers.
Positive crossmatch kidney transplants move medical science one step closer to xenotransplantation (pig-to-human organ transplants). "The barrier to putting a pig kidney into a human is the presence of antibodies," says Dr. Stegall. "With positive crossmatch transplants, we have crossed that antibody barrier in a human-to-human transplant."
"We hope to take what we've learned here to move closer to xenotransplantation, a transplant option that we hope will alleviate years of waiting for donor organs," says Dr. Stegall.
Contact: Chris Gade 507-284-5005 (days) 507-284-2511 (evenings)
e-mail: newsbureau@mayo.edu ###
I wouldn't count on ever seeing the body. I sort of believe that OBL has been dead for some time now but it doesn't seem to be in anyone's interest with the exception of Pakistan, to actually say so. I figure that if we don't see another video of the creature by the middle of Feb., he's dead and gone -- buried in a rocky Afghan cave. His terrorist bubbies will never give up the location.
Richard W.
First... Your point about livers vs. kidneys is well taken, but perhaps it's a bit too fine a point for a sand goblin to fully grasp.
By that I mean, can we be sure that the average islama-mama ever bothers to teach her children the difference between a kidney and a liver? Does she herself even know?
All she knows with any certainty is that, should she accidentally show a little ankle, her unemployed moslem husband will beat her mercilessly until something in her abdomen hurts like fire...
Now I'm all over the map here, I know... Stay with me...
What if bin laden sent a procurer to America to round up spare guts for him? What if that procurer was long on zeal, but a couple of sandwiches short of a picnic where it comes to sanity? What if that procurer didn't know the difference between a kidney and a liver and wisely decided to stock up on both before returning to Trashcanistan?
Sound like anyone we know?
The reward for bin laden is a cool 25 million... What's the reward for one of his gut-snatchers?
And have we let it slip through our fingers?
Come to think of it, Peep has been awfully quiet of late.
The reward for bin laden is a cool 25 million... What's the reward for one of his gut-snatchers? And have we let it slip through our fingers?
Damn. Just have to chalk it up to experience. I'm sure there are others out there, just waiting for an opportunity to harvest some livers.
As I recall, patients doing this exchange every 4 - 6 hours, 4 times a day. When the dialysate is drained in, the bag and tubing is folded up and neatly tucked away, to be brought out several hours later.
To prevent peritonitis, the patients have a UltraViolet machine (its maybe 5" high x 10" long x 5" wide)--the ends of tubing are inserted in this machine and a cycle starts which allows the UV rays to kill any bacteria.
The dialysate and all necessary medical supplies are delivered to a patient's home. Each box is about 10" x 10" x 18"...and there are 4 bags of dialysate in each box. The dialysate can abe ordered in different saturations--depends on the doctor's px.
Where your regular machine is not mobile, CAPD allows you to travel, go fishing, whatever....you can even miss an occasional bag exchange. My husband didn't have to watch salt usage, though he was wise enough to not dump a salt shaker onto everything he ate! Keeping track of fluid intake was not as critical.....again, this is because CAPD is working 24 hours a day, more like the natural body process than a machine trying to pull it off in a 4 hour period every other day.
The machine dialysis, which certainly saves a life, tends to 'beat up' the body....and it stands to reason because you're looking at 24/7 vs 4 hours every 48 hours....and the dialyzing time can be much longer if you gain to much weight....they really have to pull it off you then.
I've watched a guy that gained 12 lbs over the weekend have to dialyze for nearly 8 hours.....you talk about one sick dude....he's start to stand up and then pass out....blood pressure level going up and down, up and down, nauseated--couldn't even keep down ice chips!
Apparently doctors and medical staff are like other humans in society....some feel more comfortable with one way of doing things....that was my husband's doctor--he felt most comfortable with the machine because there wasn't a risk of peritonitis...but after a year of the machine, my husband dictacted what he wanted.
If it's a signal he's sure got an unreliable way of communicating with his cells. OBL is my age (45), but he looks and acts like a geezer.
His health isn't too good, especially for his age (speaks volumes for the wonderous benefits of his religion and cause). Hell, I ski down mountains at 40 mph at his age and he can't even lift his left arm. It'd sure be fun to see him trying to stave off a 22 year-old jarhead in hand-to-hand!
In my post #71, I mention some medical research about kidney problems. There was a mention of hemodialysis (one of several dialysis techniques). Are you familiar with that, or how often it's used? It caught my attention because one of the side-effects of hemodialysis is bloating, which might explain why UBL looked so bloated in the confession tape.
There's also mention that a symptom of untreated renal failure would be a yellow/brown or even pasty white complexion, which UBL certainly displayed in the last video.
Is it possible that UBL had a hemodialysis treatment in Kandahar (which is where it is presumed he made the confession tape), and after escaping to the mountains had no dialysis and thus began succumbing to renal failure with its telltale symptoms?
Peritoneal dialysis can certainly create bloating; it blew me up by 35 pounds as my access graft was created and matured. Hemodialysis itself should reduce fluid; most hemodialysis patients end up looking rather thin and wasted, with rather poor complexions. In between treatments, you can definitely puff up as your body builds up fluids.
If bin Laden is a dialysis patient, he would require three treatments a week (usually). He's a technician; he can figure out how to get this done, but it would be very, very difficult to do consistently for a man on the run and hiding. The treatments also freeze you in place for four hours at a time. This is also (obviously) difficult when bombs are falling.
The other type of dialysis is CAPD--using the peritoneal membrane as an 'artificial' kidney to separate out the waste products.
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