Posted on 01/17/2002 10:52:25 AM PST by MarkWar
Edited on 09/03/2002 4:49:50 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
ATLANTA
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
More seriously, I wonder how many other wild and weird disease will pop up as doctors continue to treat human beings like used cars, swapping parts from one to another? (And will things get worse when many of those parts involve genetic manipulations of other humans and/or animals...)
Mark W.
I didn't know Gore had a Kidney transplant.
I wonder how many of the transplanted organs involved were from red china?
Genuine curiosity here, not a cheap shot at that horde of murdering, sub-human savages who custom butcher people to order.
And, if not red china (where the living have every right to envy the dead) then is there another locality in common in these cases?
IOW, is there a geographical factor involved?
Also (I skimmed), does the article say how long after transplant the condition showed up?
Later in the full article, it says, "Doctors first thought the skin disease might be scleromyxedema, a life-threatening illness that also causes lesions. But a protein test appears to rule that theory out."
Would a graft/host incompatibility be expected to show similar symptoms in different patients? Also -- and I'm sure not a doctor, I'm just asking -- but if a condition was brought on by graft/host incompatibility, wouldn't the host body immune system be producing lots of biochemical markers, indicating that it was trying to reject the graft? Wouldn't that be visible to doctors trying to track this thing down?
Mark W.
In your gentle, understated way [smiles] you may have touched on a key subject here...
One of the reasons this story caught my eye, is I remembered this other thread: This Little Kidney Went To Market put up by Freeper Senator Pardek.
That thread contains amazing stuff, including these two paragraphs:
When Moshe's plane landed in Istanbul, there was no need to clear customs, no one asking for passports. "Everything was already taken care of," Moshe says. "The organization was like clockwork." Moshe and the other three patients were driven to a hospital -- An old hospital," Moshe says, "not modern, but very clean" -- and their family and friends were taken to a hotel. Apparently, even the specific taxi that transported Moshe and his family was prearranged. "The driver of the taxi that took me to the hospital had sold a kidney," Moshe says. "He showed me his scar. He told me he'd bought the cab with the money. He was very proud."
The transplant surgeries were performed late at night, when the hospital was on skeleton staff and fewer people could question what was going on. An entire floor of the hospital, Moshe says, was requisitioned by the transplant teams. Two transplants were completed each night, the first starting at about midnight, the second at about 4 a.m. Two surgeries were done the night after they landed; two more the following night. Moshe was the last of the four to go. The surgery to remove the seller's kidney, Moshe says, was performed by a Turkish team; the transplant surgery was completed by the Israeli physician and nurses who had flown with them.
Apparently there is a global market in organ trafficking. Apparently there are skilled, professional people involved. Lots of them. If there is a black market, perhaps sometimes some "questionable" material spills over into the legal market. If material can come from anywhere, if material can have, really, any kind of contamination imaginable -- if people are into black market organ smuggling, who knows what else they might be smuggling in the same shipments -- then this is a pathway by which just about anything imaginable can pass into the human population...
Mark W.
They'd better be plugging every factoid they can get their hands on into a database and looking for odd correlations.
AIDS was once just a curious 'anomaly'.
If organ recipients are given massive doses of powerful immunosuppressants, then don't the people become little more than walking Petri dishes for whatever might be contained within the implanted organ?
1) Accidently, it seems that such a person could pass along the contamination to a really large number of people.
2) If this black market thing is really wide spread, it seems to me that it's just barely possible that someone really evil minded could arrange for badly contaminated organs to be implanted on purpose, if the contamination proved to be something which would grow in the "host" and get passed on...
Mark W.
A friend of mine has it -- it seems to be somewhat treatable through diet and tetracycline.
Did you get another kidney yet? My husband didn't survive his kidney/pancreas transplant in 1997. It's good to see a success, even if it is limited. However, I think organ transplantation needs to soon become archaic. Unfortunately, it generates so much money for hospitals and doctors and clinics that it looks like it is here to stay rather than being replaced with superior treatments.
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