Transplant eyeball sent to pub

From the Courier Mail:

David Killick

January 24, 2008 07:21am

AN EYEBALL sent from Queensland for a transplant operation in Hobart went astray this week - arriving at a pub instead of the hospital.

A hotel guest in the Tasmanian city of Hobart was shocked when he received a foam box on Tuesday night containing a single human eyeball.

The box marked ``Live human organs for transplant'' was delivered by mistake by an unwitting taxi driver.

Hotel worker Gabriel Winner - who requested the name of the hotel not be used - says the agitated guest brought the esky to reception early yesterday morning.

``The guy left with me with a box with an eyeball in it,'' he said.

``He got the box and signed for it and opened it in the middle of the night.

``I thought this is just too weird. I went and put it in the fridge because I didn't know what else to do with it. It was more than a little disconcerting.''

A courier arrived shortly after and took the esky away.

Tracking records for the consignment number on the esky confirmed Australian Air Express picked the package up in Brisbane shortly before 4pm on Tuesday.

The package was dropped at 9.40pm that night. An Australian Air Express spokeswoman confirmed a ``failure in an internal handover process'' which meant the taxi driver was given the wrong package to deliver.

She said the company sincerely regretted the incident.

``As soon as we discovered the error we quickly rectified that and delivered the consignment within the appropriate timeframe,'' she said.

Mr Winner said he was disappointed that someone could have missed out on an operation because of such a basic error.

"It says on the box `human eye tissue for transplant'. What it probably means is the person who was relying on this piece of human tissue has now had to postpone their operation.

``Somebody died to donate these organs to somebody else and they've screwed it up and it's probably not even viable now.''

Queensland Health spokeswoman Penny Geraghty confirmed the incident but said tissue from the eye was recovered and successfully transferred to a patient yesterday morning.

``Nobody missed their operation. The tissue wasn't compromised,'' she said.

She said this was the first time an incident of this type had occurred.

Teen changes blood group, immune system

From the Toronto Star:

Jan 25, 2008 12:42 PM

Reuters

CANBERRA - An Australian teenage girl has become the world's first known transplant patient to change blood groups and take on the immune system of her organ donor, doctors said on Friday, calling her a "one-in-six-billion miracle."

Demi-Lee Brennan, now 15, received a donor liver when she was 9 years old and her own liver failed.

"It's like my second chance at life," Brennan told local media, recounting how her body achieved what doctors said was the holy grail of transplant surgery. "It's kind of hard to believe."

Brennan's body changed blood group from O negative to O positive when she became ill while on drugs to avoid rejection of the organ by her body's immune system.

Her new liver's blood stem cells then invaded her body's bone marrow to take over her entire immune system, meaning the teen no longer needs anti-rejection drugs.

Doctors from Sydney's Westmead Childrens' Hospital said they had no explanation for Brennan's recovery, detailed in the latest edition of The New England Journal of Medicine.

"There was no precedent for this having happened at any other time, so we were sort of flying by the seat of our pants," Michael Stormon, a pediatric hepatologist, told local radio.

Stuart Dorney, the hospital's former transplant unit head, said Brennan's treatment could lead to breakthroughs in organ transplant treatment, because normally the immune system of recipients attacked the transplanted tissue.

"We now need to go back over everything that happened to Demi-Lee and see why, and if it can be replicated," said Dorney.

"We think because we used a young person's liver and Demi-Lee had low white blood cells, that could have been a reason," he told the Daily Telegraph newspaper.

Rejection is normally treated with a combination of drugs, although chronic rejection is irreversible.

Only seven-in-10 transplant operations in Australia are successful after a five-year period due to rejection complications.