Word: transplant
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Cord-cell transplants have been performed for other blood diseases, such as leukemia, but they remain experimental and highly risky. Dr. Andrew Yeager, a transplant physician at Emory University medical school in Atlanta, warned the Penns that not only might Keone die, but there was not even more than a 50% chance the procedure would do any good. After seven years of blood transfusions that were becoming more and more painful and increasingly ineffective, Keone decided he had no other choice. "Mama, I might die anyway," he told his mother Leslie, a medical technician, who left the decision entirely...
...prepare for the transplant, Keone had to undergo nine days of chemotherapy. The object was to kill his bone marrow, the source of his sickled blood cells, as well as to neutralize his immune system so it would accept the new cells. These came from an anonymous donor at the New York Blood Center and were fed intravenously into Keone on Dec. 11 last year by Yeager and his colleagues at the AFLAC Cancer Center of Children's Healthcare of Atlanta (formerly Egleston Children's Hospital...
...take hold almost immediately, but for Keone the aftermath of the expensive ($200,000) treatment was like a death-defying roller-coaster ride. Again and again, he was readmitted to the hospital with fevers, diarrhea and loss of appetite, once for a six-week stay. Nine months after the transplant, his new immune system began attacking his own cells, inflaming his liver and intestines. Strong immunosuppressive drugs brought that emergency under control before any permanent damage occurred. Still, no one was breathing easy, least of all the physicians...
Last week, on the first anniversary of the transplant, Yeager finally felt justified medically in pronouncing Keone cured. "The cord blood cells are now fully operational, making all healthy blood cells in Keone," he says. Equally important, there was no sign of sickle cells and no need for more transfusions. That, of course, was a coup for the doctors, who believe their widely watched experiment could benefit other severely ill sickle-cell kids who can't find matching donors for conventional transplants. Indeed, Yeager believes using umbilical cells could increase the number of successful transplants...
...international travelers, drug users and workers in the food-service, health-care or day-care industry. The test for hepatitis-C virus has been added for all women 13 and older and for women at particularly high risk (women who take intravenous drugs and those who received an organ transplant or a blood transfusion before...