One month after experimental pig heart transplant, doctors say they see no signs of rejection or infection
(www.cnn.com)
from L4s@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world on 23 Oct 2023 14:00
https://lemmy.world/post/7216395
from L4s@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world on 23 Oct 2023 14:00
https://lemmy.world/post/7216395
One month after experimental pig heart transplant, doctors say they see no signs of rejection or infection::One month after an experimental procedure to transplant the heart of a genetically modified pig into a patient with end-stage heart disease, doctors say the heart is functioning on its own and shows no signs of rejection.
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
“The physicians taking care of him believe his heart function is excellent,” said Dr. Bartley Griffith, director of the Cardiac and Lung Transplant Program at the University of Maryland School of Medicine who performed the surgery.
Dr. Muhammad Mohiuddin, director of UMMC’s Cardiac Xenotransplantation Program, said in an update shared on Friday, “we are withdrawing all the drugs that were initially supporting his heart.
“We are working very hard with our physical therapy team who are spending a lot of time helping him regain the strength that he’s lost during last one month of hospital stay,” Mohiuddin said.
Faucette is a married father of two from Frederick, Maryland, and a 20-year Navy veteran who had most recently worked as a lab technician at the National Institutes of Health.
“My only real hope left is to go with the pig heart, the xenotransplant,” Faucette told the hospital in an internal interview several days before the surgery.
Mohiuddin and Griffith established the country’s first center for cardiac xenotransplantation research and performed the first such experimental surgery on 57-year-old David Bennett in January 2022.
The original article contains 906 words, the summary contains 180 words. Saved 80%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
The last guy died after 2 months and didn’t show any signs of rejection either… I wouldn’t break out the party yet.
That’s because he happened to get a verry treatable infection but was already immunocompromised. The pig heart was never the issue
The other guy refused to take his medication properly and was warned that he would otherwise die
That’s true, but he may very well have died due to a virus the tissue was infected with. There’s no sign this heart has the same issue.
They gotta do this for an ex-cop to make it funny
Pig to pig heart transplants are already possible. This was the first time it being transplanted to a human!
The first one was done in Jan 2022. The patient, David Bennet, survived for 2 months.
Whoooaaaah, we’re halfway theeere…
Does he still eat pork though?
Would it be considered cannibalism?
Would it be good for his heart?
Cool technology, but kind of fucked up we grow animals with spare parts for us only to take them out and kill them. Once this gets to the point we can grow them in a petri dish the ethical concerns should no longer be an issue.
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What if the rest of the animal is used as food?
I think their point of view was as if we were judged by an intelligent alien species, where we would have to admit yeah it does look fucked
Intelligent ≠ vegan
Ew that’s kind of messed up, isn’t it?
I think it’s much less fucked than growing them just for food we don’t actually need to eat, just luxury. And we do that on an absurdly large scale.
I mean you’re not wrong…
If you’re not a vegan this is a super weird take. Hell, as a vegan myself, I don’t have a massive issue with trading pig lives for human lives. Yes it’d be ideal if we did it in other ways, but there’s an actually decent argument that it’s permissible and even good to save humans by killing animals.
Killing pigs because “mmm bacon” though? Yeah that’s a bad reason. Pleasure doesn’t permit suffering, most humans understand that unlees it’s their own pleasure they’re talking about.
Given the hivemind that are social media websites and their tendency to lean toward “mmm bacon”, you never know who will react when you talk about the ethics behind killing animals. Even planting the seed of considering them not just bio-bags of spare organs could lead someone to question their consumption of meat down the road.