Transplants

MADRID - A young man who underwent the world’s first double leg transplant might be able to walk with the aid of crutches in six or seven months if his rehabilitation goes well, the surgeon who oversaw the operation said yesterday. Dr. Pedro Cavadas said the patient is a man in his 20s who lost his legs high above the knees in an accident, but gave no other details on him or the donor. The surgery started Sunday in Valencia in eastern Spain and lasted 10 hours. Cavadas said the patient was elated upon seeing his new limbs.

"Modern Family" star Sarah Hyland has had a kidney transplant after a lifetime of pain and fatigue. The 21-year-old actress, who plays big-eyed teenager Haley Dunphy on the hit ABC comedy, told ABC's "Good Morning America" for a report aired Monday that she had the surgery in April, At age 9, she was diagnosed with abnormal kidney development. The condition often left her exhausted or in pain. But as her health grew worse, she began seeking an organ donor. Her father, actor Edward James Hyland, was a match.

CAMBRIDGE - Biotechnology company Genzyme Corp. said yesterday that a panel recommended European approval for the stem cell transplant drug Mozobil. The drug is used for stem cell transplants in patients with the blood cancers non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and multiple myeloma. Mozobil, in combination with growth-factor drugs, helps move hematopietic stem cells from a person's bone marrow into the bloodstream, where they can be collected. Current treatments often involve chemotherapy or growth factors to achieve the same movement.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Dick Cheney has been released from a Northern Virginia hospital after having a heart transplant. The former vice president's office said in a statement that the 71-year-old Cheney was released Tuesday from Inova Fairfax Hospital Heart and Vascular Institute 10 days after receiving a new heart from an unknown donor. Cheney waited nearly two years for the heart. He has had five heart attacks since the age of 37 and suffered his most recent one in 2010.

JOHANNESBURG — A major South African hospital chain and its chief executive have been charged after an investigation into human organ trafficking across continents, hospital officials and police said yesterday. Police spokesman Vish Naidoo said 11 suspects were ordered to appear in court in November. He refused to name them, but the board of directors of the Netcare hospital chain said in a statement that the parent company, its chief executive, Dr. Richard Friedland, and its subsidiary in the eastern province of KwaZulu-Natal received subpoenas on Wednesday.

‘Three Rivers’’ is going to have a profound effect on viewers. After watching the new CBS medical drama about organ transplants, you’ll never think of coolers in the same way again. Once a sacred picnic essential, a portable home to beer and burger patties, coolers will hereafter be identified with the cross-country transfer of hearts on ice. And we’re not talking romaine. The series, which premieres tomorrow at 9 p.m. on Channel 4, is otherwise pretty useless. “Three Rivers,’’ named after a fictional Pittsburgh medical center, is just more TV gurney sprinting - the same material...

LARRY'S KIDNEY , By Daniel Asa Rose, William Morrow , 320 pp., $25.99 What do you do when you get a call from a black sheep cousin you haven't heard from in years? And he calls to tell you he's dying? And to tell you that maybe, just maybe, you can help save his life by helping him get a new kidney? There's one catch, though. The odds of getting a kidney are much better in China than in the United States. Your cousin doesn't travel much, so can you go with him to help him make his way around a strange country?

ATLANTA — From the sky, the city looks like a mushroom that sprouted in a featureless plain, wth no big river, ocean port, or mountain range to lend the spot significance. You have to wonder how they decided where to plant Atlanta. But today, the city is a bumptious, sprawling hive of 5 million souls, many transplants who brought their foodways with them. Ethnic restaurants abound, but the food trend isn't banh mi, tacos al pastor, or even ribs. It's high-end burgers with hand-cut fries, craft beers, and plenty of grass-fed attitude.

This is not a story about geopolitics. This is a story about a boy. But because the boy is Palestinian, his story is intertwined with geopolitics. The boy was born terribly ill. He got treatment, for years, at an Israeli hospital, financed largely by the Israeli government. And when Israeli doctors felt they couldn't perform the complicated surgery he needed, they turned to Boston Children's Hospital, and to a group of mostly Jewish benefactors. They came together, across borders and boundaries, to save a boy — but they were also well aware of the statement they were making.

With the city awash in ethnic eateries, we set out to discover who really cooks it up right - whose shepherd's pie tastes straight from an Irish farmhouse kitchen, whose shredded pork in garlic sauce captures the genuine flavors of Shanghai, whose salmon tagine mimics true Moroccan cooking, whose tomato sauce is spot-on Sardinian, whose brown bread and baked beans would make longtime New Englanders proud. Hit these 29 restaurants, and take a virtual trip around the world. Italian, Northern and Southern Purists argue there is no true northern or southern Italian cuisine, only...

A year after Dallas Wiens received a face from an anonymous donor to replace the one he had lost in a horrific power line accident, his new face feels like his own, down to the smallest details. Since his transplant surgery last March at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Wiens has steadily gained movement in his cheeks, mouth, nose, and forehead. He turns up the corners of his lips into a smile. He smells food and can eat and drink normally. And, except on a small patch above his left eye, he can feel the sun, a breeze, and the kisses of his 4-year-old daughter, Scarlette.

The nation's first full face transplant recipient says he can feel his daughter's kisses now, a year after the procedure. Dallas Wiens (WEENS) of Fort Worth, Texas, was at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston on Monday to follow up with his transplant team. He says he can use his face more than he expected. His face was burned in 2008 when his head touched a high-voltage power line while he was standing in a cherry picker. He also was blinded. Wiens says feeling his daughter's kisses has brought him to tears more than once.

BALTIMORE - After 15 years of wearing a mask and living as a recluse, a 37-year-old Virginia man disfigured in a gun accident got a new face, nose, teeth, and jaw in what University of Maryland physicians say is the most extensive face transplant ever performed. Richard Lee Norris of Hillsville is recovering well after last week's surgery, beginning to feel his face and already brushing his teeth and shaving, University of Maryland Medical Center officials announced Tuesday. He has also regained his sense of smell, which he had lost after the accident.

CHICAGO - Doctors say it is unlikely that former Vice President Dick Cheney, who is 71, got special treatment when he was given a new heart that thousands of younger people also were in line to receive. Still, his case reopens debate about whether rules should be changed to favor youth over age in giving out scarce organs. As it stands now, time on the waiting list, medical need, and where you live determine the odds of receiving a new heart - not how many years you will live to make use of it. "The ethical issues are not that he had a transplant, but who didn't?"

What if there existed a Fountain of Youth, a source of unending health and vitality which could not only extend the lives of those lucky enough to partake of it, but allow them to be lived without the inevitable disease and decay that accompany aging? The scientific, technological, and medical advances of the last century and a half have transformed life for most into something altogether different from 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes's description of it as "nasty, brutish, and short.

PHILADELPHIA -- Doctors are reporting two advances that may give women with cancer safer ways to preserve their ability to have children without compromising their chances of beating the disease. One involves a new way to help women store up eggs before having cancer treatments that often leave them infertile. The other is a very sensitive method for checking frozen ovarian tissue for abnormal cells that could seed a relapse of cancer if transplanted back into a woman who finished treatment and wanted to have a child.