Ahmedabad: Marengo CIMS Hospital in a statement said it has conducted the first ever bi-lateral Lung Transplant in Gujarat.

According to the hospital, the lung transplant surgery was performed on a 41-year-old Syrian patient suffering from Interstitial lung disease. He had a strong family history with two of his sisters succumbing to the disease at a young age. The patient, very sick and on very high flow oxygen, was shifted to India and admitted in Marengo CIMS Hospital since last 25 days.

The heart, also retrieved from the same deceased person, was transplanted into a 41-year-old patient from Bilimora admitted in Marengo CIMS Hospital for heart failure since past couple of months. The organs were allotted to the patients by NOTTO and SOTTO.

The hospital informed that the deceased donor was a 47-year-old who suffered a brain haemorrhage for which he was operated at a hospital in Rajkot but did not recover and was declared brain dead by the doctors. The relatives of the deceased after counseling agreed for donating heart, lung, liver, kidneys, skin, and eyes bringing the organs donated to a total of nine.

Marengo Asia Healthcare has in a statement thanked the organ donor family for giving new lease of life to several people. Thanks to SOTTO, NOTTO, Traffic police of Rajkot and Ahmedabad, the Airport Authority and the government of Gujarat.

The deceased organ donation rate in India at less than 1 percent per million population, is a major handicap, and translates to less than one person per million opting to donate their organs. Superstitions and stigma, lack of transplant coordinators, and lack of required infrastructure for certifying and maintaining brain-dead patients are the reasons behind the low donation numbers in India. While lack of organ donation is one side of the story, the other is the lack of required processes, skilled experts, hospital infrastructure, and the lack of sufficient examples of long-term organ transplant survivors in the community that become role models for organ transplantation.