A woman in California delivered what may be the nation’s second live-born set of octuplets on Monday morning, surprising doctors who expected seven babies.
The six boys and two girls — ranging in weight from 1 pound 8 ounces to 3 pounds 4 ounces — were generally doing well in incubators following their Caesarean-section delivery at Kaiser Permanente hospital in Bellflower, California, doctors said.
Three of the babies need breathing assistance, but otherwise the eight don’t appear to have serious problems, doctors said at a news conference Monday evening.
Surgeons in Spain have carried out the world’s first tissue-engineered whole organ transplant – using a windpipe made with the patient’s own stem cells.
The groundbreaking technology also means for the first time tissue transplants can be carried out without the need for anti-rejection drugs.
Five months on the patient, 30-year-old mother-of-two Claudia Castillo, is in perfect health, The Lancet reports.
She needed the transplant to save a lung after contracting tuberculosis.
A sterile woman is to give birth to the world’s first baby conceived after a full ovary transplant.
The 38-year-old was rendered infertile when her ovaries failed at the age of 15, causing her to suffer an early menopause. After receiving an ovary transplanted from her twin sister, the woman, who lives in London, is expected to give birth this week.
The pioneering surgery will give hope not only to more than 100,000 British women who suffer an early menopause, but also to those undergoing chemotherapy or radiotherapy for cancer. They could now freeze an ovary before beginning the treatment.
A former US Marine has become the first woman in the world to be fitted with a “bionic” arm that she can control by her thoughts alone.
Claudia Mitchell lost her left arm at the shoulder in a motorbike accident.
Her new arm works by detecting movements of a chest muscle that has been connected to the remains of nerves that once went to her real arm.
The first prototype was fitted to double amputee Jesse Sullivan four years ago.
MUNICH, Germany (AP) — A German farmer who received the world’s first complete double arm transplant said Wednesday that incredulity gave way to joy when he woke from surgery to discover he had arms again.
Karl Merk, who lost his arms in a farming accident six years ago, said he at first could not believe that the transplant appeared to have been succesful.
“It was really overwhelming when I saw that I had arms again,” said the 54-year-old, who wore a sleeveless black shirt showing clearly where his new arms had been grafted.
“These are my arms, and I’m not giving them away again,” he told reporters at the Munich University Clinic where he remains nearly three months after the 15-hour operation.
LOS GATOS, Calif. (AP) — A 6-year-old girl is recovering after surgeons reattached her left hand, severed when it was caught in a loop of jump rope that had snagged on the axle of her mother’s car.
Erica Rix underwent 10 hours of surgery after the accident in early September and spent nine days in intensive care before returning home.
Erica was playing with a jump rope in the back seat of her mother’s car and let one end of the rope out the window to flutter in the wind.
