27th July, 2011
Nigeria on Tuesday recorded a major medical breakthrough by performing another successful kidney transplantation, reports the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN)
NAN reports that the medical feat was achieved by a team of surgeons of the Lagos University Teaching Hospital (LUTH), Idi Araba, Lagos.
It was the second successful kidney transplantation in Nigeria, by Nigerians.
An official source at LUTH told NAN that the four-hour operation “went very well”, adding that the kidney recipient “is responding positively” at the hospital.
NAN learnt that LUTH authorities would make a formal announcement of the medical breakthrough at a news conference on Thursday.
Nigeria’s first kidney transplant was conducted on 31-year-old Suleiman Usman in Sept. 2010 by the University of Maiduguri Teaching Hospital (UMTH), in collaboration with the Bayero University Teaching Hospital, Kano and the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife.
The kidney was donated by his brother, Abubakar Usman at the university’s Kidney Centre.
“With the successful transplant, there would be no more need to send kidney patients for transplant in foreign countries,” UMTH said then.
Kidney transplantation or renal transplantation is the organ transplant of a kidney into a patient with end-stage renal disease.
The first kidney transplantation in the United States was performed on June 17, 1950, on a 44-year-old woman, Ruth Tucker, at Little Company of Mary Hospital in Evergreen Park, Illinois.
The donated kidney was, however, rejected ten months later because no immunosuppressive therapy was available at the time.
Bill Thompson is the longest-surviving American kidney recipient, having received his kidney in 1966 at age 15; it has survived over 40 years.
Also, Denice Lombard of Washington, D.C., received her father’s kidney on August 30, 1967, at age 13 and is still alive and healthy forty years later.
More than half of the over 27,000 kidney transplantations so far undertaken across the world were carried out in the US.