Word: organisms
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Seventeen-year-old Jesica Santillan was supposed to be one of the lucky ones. After years of living in pain brought on by her failing organs, the teenager finally matched with a heart-lung donor and was admitted to Duke University Medical Center in early February for a double-organ transplant. Thursday morning, after her body rejected the first set of new organs mistakenly implanted with the wrong blood type, Santillan lies in her hospital bed fighting for her life after a second implant procedure. Early reports indicate the second transplant has been successful; Jesica is given a 50 percent...
...Duke spokesman Richard Puff says the medical center accepts full responsibility for the "tragic" mistake and has already implemented new safety procedures - including a triple-layer system to check blood type matching - to ensure this kind of error will never happen again. The hospital, which performed its first organ transplant in 1965 and now performs the most lung transplants in the country, says there has never been a donor mix-up at the facility before. According to Puff, the investigation is ongoing, and there is no word when the hospital will release new findings on the cause of the error...
...deaths in hospitals from medical errors - an astonishingly high number (more than the number of deaths from breast cancer, car accidents or AIDS) that's generally given little media attention. Assuming, however, that we are talking about transplants, the prognosis is more promising. According to the United Network of Organ Sharing (UNOS), 23,000 transplants were performed last year alone. And in the history of transplantation, there are only two cases of dangerous blood type mismatches on record since transplantation began (some blood types can be intermingled with few or no consequences...
First known American death caused by gene therapy: Jesse Gelsinger, 18, dies of multiple-organ failure after receiving an experimental treatment...
...will be a different kind of medicine, used in attacking AIDS and cancer as well as in organ replacements. It will basically be used for all currently intractable diseases. Drugs will be more specific, more powerful, and they will come from a much deeper knowledge of the relevant biology. They won't be shots in the dark as some are today...