In the shadow of the coronavirus pandemic, the transplant team at Schneider Hospital recently conducted three lifesaving transplant operations on small children.
By Yakir Benzion, United With Israel
The coronavirus lockdown in Israel may have shuttered schools and forced millions to stay at home, but the pandemic has not changed the threat faced by people, especially children, who are in dire need of lifesaving organ transplants.
In Israel three organ transplants for children were carried out during the pandemic, including a complex and rare liver transplant on an 8-month-old that has only been attempted a few times in the world, the Schneider Children’s Medical Center announced Sunday.
The children’s hospital located in Petah Tikvah, a few miles east of Tel Aviv, had several children awaiting transplants including a baby suffering from congenital malformations who was in urgent need of a liver transplant.
In order to stabilize his condition, several invasive, complex catheterizations had to be performed to stop the leak of fluid from the baby’s liver to sustain him until he was 8 months old, an age at which he was finally mature enough to attempt an organ transplant to save his life. For the complex surgery, the baby’s father donated part of his own liver.
Another liver transplant surgery was performed on a seven-and-a half-year-old boy suffering from the same genetic liver disease that necessitated lifesaving liver transplant surgery for his two brothers years before. In the third case, a 17-year-old girl received a kidney transplant.
The hospital said it was proud of its medical teams, which continued working through the corona pandemic, “giving everything for our patients.”