Parents of a 6-day old baby who died agreed to donate her organs for transplantation, a first in British medical Hospital. Doctors said that this will give hope to hundreds of other newborn babies and older children.
The transplant was done by a medical team at Hammersmith Hospital in London from a tiny newborn baby, that involves her kidneys and liver cells. The donor was a baby girl born at term after an emergency caesarean section. The baby was very sick since her brain had been starved of oxygen for a long period during the pregnancy that damaged her brain and was not able to respond to any stimuli. She weighed almost 3.2kg.
The doctor who attended to the baby, Gaurav Atreja, said, "It's extremely hard to put into words, the nature of my job". He said he was "very factual with the parents" and that "they showed their keenness and came back very quickly" to agree to the transplant.
Her parents gave consent to the hospital for organ donation, and 6 days after she was born when the death had been confirmed, the organs were retrieved with the help of an experienced surgeon from the National Organ Retrieval Service.
The baby's kidneys, only 3.8cm long, were about a third the size of an adult's, doctors said, but such organs are normally fully functioning after only about 37 weeks of pregnancy.
The researchers hope that this will help revolutionize a new way of thinking about neonatal organ donation.
