Pa. Girl Who Got New Lungs After Parents Sued Over Transplant Rules Develops Pneumonia

[NNguyenMD]

38. I think its called the Novo Lung

It's very similar to ECMO, like a dialysis machine that performs the gas exchange that your lungs are incapable of performing. Not aware of its use in the US. These types of therapies require a lot of blood flow an large IV catheters that go into large blood vessels. Which means a potential source of.infection, and in all likelihood would also require being on some sort of blood thinner to prevent clots from forming in the machine and tubing.

This is a horribly tragic story. Lung transplants are the most challenging solid organs to maintain and have a notoriously high complication rate. My deepest prayers go out to this little girl and her family. I don't pretend to understand the anguish and pain this family is going through. But when it comes to an incredibly scarce resource like solid organs, I do believe in a dispassionate system to allocate these organs based on medical expertise not not by judges and certainly not the media.

I'm not up to speed on the prevalence of dual LUNG transplant recipients, or if children can only receive dual LUNG transplants. But for adults the norm was single LUNG transplants to each recipient, meaning there were 4 potential adult recipients of these adult sized lungs. However for the lungs infected with pneumonia, the second and current set she has, it is possible that they would have been declined by all the potential recipients in the area she lives.