Doctors from Nemours/A.I. duPont Hospital for Children have completed Jamaica’s first-ever liver transplants, including one on a boy they said had days to live.
Dr. Stephen Dunn, a Nemours surgeon, and a team of doctors transplanted two livers in Kingston, Jamaica, late last week. The first was on a Zaiden, a 13-month-old boy who was critically ill, and the second was on Kayon, a 16-month-old boy.
Both children have biliary atresia, a disease that if untreated can lead to liver failure. They received the liver donations from their father and uncle, respectively.
Dunn said Zaiden would have been “dead in the next few days” if he didn’t have the surgery. The doctor said the transplant will add decades to the children’s lives.
Unlike in the United States, developing countries don’t have a network or infrastructure to find organ transplants for patients, doctors said.
“Jamaica is two countries,” Dunn said. “It’s the country Americans think of and then there’s the Jamaica that has a long history as a nation of hard-working people. We’re getting to know the real Jamaica.”
Nemours doctors plan to teach and assist Jamaican doctors with liver transplants over the next couple of years, with the hopes they will eventually be able to perform the surgery on their own.
They estimate they will have to assist Jamaican doctors with about a dozen more surgeries.
About six years ago, Nemours’ first Jamaican patient came to Delaware for a transplant. Word quickly go out on the island, resulting in six more families traveling to Wilmington for a liver transplant.
But because health care is so expensive in the United States, it’s not feasible for Nemours to be the go-to hospital for Caribbean families.
In the last five years, doctors at Bustamante Hospital for Children, a public hospital in Kingston, have acquired the technology and medicine needed for a transplant.
Each Nemours doctor had a Jamaican counterpart whom they helped teach. Most of the surgery consisted of taking out the inflamed liver and preserving the attaching blood vessels, which can be a bloody procedure, Dunn said.
Biliary atresia is a condition in which the liver cells produce a liquid that digests fat. It’s the most common reason babies need a transplant, the doctors said. Without surgery, 95 percent of babies who have the condition won’t live past 18 months due to malnutrition and infections.
While the doctors were in Kingston, they met two more patients they believe will need to have transplant surgery in the next year, Dunn said. The Nemours doctors plan to have the Jamaican doctors’ roles during the surgery incrementally increase with every new patient they see.
Nemours doctors will follow up with the two boys through telemedicine for the next month.
Dunn said the “ultimate goal” is for the Jamaican people and government to embrace a transplant network like those in the United States.
Great!! Thats what they beed to invest in.