‘COVID patient’ gets rare lung transplant
US suicides dropped
TOKYO, April 10, (Agencies): Doctors in Japan announced Thursday they have successfully performed the world’s first transplant of lung tissue from living donors to a patient with severe lung damage from COVID-19.
The recipient, identified only as a woman from Japan’s western region of Kansai, is recovering after the nearly 11hour operation on Wednesday, Kyoto University Hospital said in a statement. It said her husband and son, who donated parts of their lungs, are also in stable condition.
The university said it was the world’s first transplant of lung tissue from living donors to a person with COVID-19 lung damage. Transplants from brain-dead donors in Japan are still rare, and living donors are considered a more realistic option for patients.
“We demonstrated that we now have an option of lung transplants (from living donors),” Dr. Hiroshi Date, a thoracic surgeon at the hospital who led the operation, said at a news conference. “I think this is a treatment that gives hope for patients” with severe lung damage from COVID-19, he said.
Kyoto University said dozens of transplants of parts of lungs taken from brain-dead donors to patients with COVID-19-related lung damage have been carried out in the United States, Europe and China.
The woman contracted COVID-19 late last year and developed breathing difficulties that rapidly worsened. She was placed on a life support machine that works as an artificial lung for more than three months at another hospital because her lungs were so severely damaged.
Even after she was free of the virus, her lungs were no longer functional or treatable, and the only option for her to live was to receive a lung transplant, the university said.
Her husband and son volunteered to donate parts of their lungs, and the surgery was conducted at Kyoto University Hospital by a 30-member team headed by Dr Date. Her husband donated part of his left lung, and son gave part of his right lung.
She is expected to be able to leave the hospital in about two months and return to her normal life in about three months, the university said.
Meanwhile, Japan reported 3,302 new cases of the coronavirus over the last 24 hours as of 04:00 pm (0700 GMT) on Friday, raising the nation’s total number to 498,106, the health ministry and local authorities said.
The country’s cumulative death toll rose by 29 to 9,348. Tokyo added 537 new infections, topping 500 for the third straight day, which brought the total cases in the Japanese capital to 124,987.
The tallies exclude those who were linked to a virus-hit cruise ship in February 2020.
Amid a resurgence in infections, the government panel of experts on Friday approved a plan to apply stricter anti-coronavirus measures to Tokyo, Kyoto and Okinawa prefectures.
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Suicides: The number of US suicides fell nearly 6% last year amid the coronavirus pandemic – the largest annual decline in at least four decades, according to preliminary government data.
Death certificates are still coming in and the count could rise. But officials expect a substantial decline will endure, despite worries that COVID-19 could lead to more suicides.
It is hard to say exactly why suicide deaths dropped so much, but one factor may be a phenomenon seen in the early stages of wars and national disasters, some experts suggested.
“There’s a heroism phase in every disaster period, where we’re banding together and expressing lots of messages of support that we’re in this together,” said Dr Christine Moutier, chief medical officer of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. “You saw that, at least in the early months of the pandemic.”
An increase in the availability of telehealth services and other efforts to turn around the nation’s suicide problem may have also contributed, she said.
US suicides steadily rose from the early 2000s until 2018, when the national suicide rate hit its highest level since 1941. The rate finally fell slightly in 2019. Experts credited increased mental health screenings and other suicide prevention efforts.
The number fell further last year, to below 45,000, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a recent report. It was the lowest number of US suicide deaths since 2015.
Many worried that such progress might end when COVID-19 arrived.
The pandemic sparked a wave of business closures. Millions of people were forced to stay at home, many of them alone. In surveys, more Americans reported depression, anxiety and drug and alcohol use. Adding to that dangerous mix, firearm purchases rose 85% in March 2020.
But the spring of last year actually saw the year’s most dramatic decline in suicide numbers, said the CDC’s Farida Ahmad, the lead author of a recent report in the Journal of the American Medical Association that detailed the decline.
Suicide had been the nation’s 10th leading cause of death, but dropped to 11th in 2020. That was mainly due to the arrival of COVID-19, which killed at least 345,000 Americans and became the nation’s No. 3 killer. But the decline in suicide deaths also contributed to the ranking fall.
The CDC has not yet reported national suicide rates for 2020, nor has it provided a breakdown of suicides by state, age or race and ethnicity.
Moutier is anxious to see more data. For example, while overall suicides decreased last year, it’s possible that suicides by youths and young adults did not, she said.
She’s optimistic the recent declines will mark the beginning of a lasting trend. But she also worries there may be a delayed effect on the mental health of many people, as they get past the pandemic’s initial threats but sink into grieving the people and things they lost.
“There’s sort of an evolution of mental health distress,” she said. “It’s possible we will see the whole mental health ramifications of this pandemic” later.
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MIAMI: A South Florida doctor who died about two weeks after he got Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine died in a manner that has been categorized as natural, an official with the medical examiner’s office said Wednesday.
Dr Gregory Michael died from a condition that can cause internal bleeding and there is no medical certainty that the shot caused the disorder, according to an email from Darren Caprara, director of operations for the Miami-Dade County Medical Examiner Department.
Michael’s death in January was investigated by the Florida Department of Health and the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Samples from an autopsy were sent to the CDC.
“Scientific and clinical expertise in vaccine safety, immunology, infectious diseases, hematology, pathology, and laboratory science were part of the investigating team or consulted frequently,” Caprara said.
The investigative team concluded that Michael died from complications of immune thrombocytopenia, otherwise known as ITP, a disorder that can prevent blood from clotting and cause internal bleeding. Michael died in January from the disorder more than two weeks after getting the shot.
Michael, 56, was an obstetrician with a private practice at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami Beach.