Saudi Arabia: Family donates all organs of dead member

Cairo: Organs, donated by a family of a dead member, have been transplanted in five different patients, including a baby, in a Saudi hospital, the Saudi news agency SPA has reported.

Surgeons at the King Faisal Specialist Hospital in Riyadh had performed five simultaneous transplant operations on the five patients, including the 23-month-old baby, it added. The patients had previously suffered from failures in the small intestines, heart, liver and kidneys.

The family of the deceased person, who was killed in a road crash, had donated all organs of the 24-year-old man. His liver was split up into two parts and transplanted in the baby and a 63-year-old man. The kidney was extracted and transplanted into a 60-year-old woman, while the small intestines were transplanted into a 34-year-old man and the heart into a woman aged 36 years. The simultaneous transplants, conducted last month, took 10 hours, according to SPA.

“Such transplant micro-surgeries can be performed simultaneously only at a few medical centres around the world as they require qualified surgical, medical, nursing, lab and technical professionals in addition to presence of highly equipped infrastructure facilities,” Dr Majed Al Fayad, the executive supervisor-general of the Faisal Specialist Centre, said.

“There was medical preparedness to conduct transplants of the pancreas and lungs, but when the organs were examined, they were found to be unfit for transplantation,” he added.

Around 70 teams of surgeons, anesthesia, nursing, labs and imaging were directly engaged in the five transplants, according to Dr Al Fayad.

The patients, who received the donated organs, are in good health. “Most of them left the hospital and undergo regular medical checks,” he added.