First Face Transplant In Turkey.

Al Salamu 'Alaykum.

ANKARA: Turkish surgeons on Saturday successfully performed the country's first-ever face transplant, the Anatolia news agency reported. A team of doctors at Akdeniz University in the southern city of Antalya performed the operation on a 19-year-old boy whose face was burned when he was a 40-day-old baby, said Anatolia.

Tissue from the face of a 45-year-old donor was successfully transplanted, it said.

The operation brings to 20 the number of face transplants carried out worldwide, the report said. The first was a partial face transplant on Frenchwoman Isabelle Dinoire in 2005.

Turkish doctors were performing another operation Saturday from the same donor, on a 34-year old man in what was reported as the world's first double arm and single leg transplant.

Doctors were transplanting limbs to a man who lost both arms and one leg when he was electrocuted at the age of 11, said Anatolia. “Today could be a day of many firsts for the medical world,” the Anadolu Agency quoted Dr. Zafer Aydin as saying.

“We are hoping that the operation is a success and that it is a world first,” said Aydin, who heads the organ transplant unit at the hospital in western Turkey where the donor’s limbs were removed. “Two arms and a leg have never been transplanted on one patient until today.”

The hospital in Antalya said an announcement would be made after the surgery.

Anadolu said Atilla Kavdir, the 34-year-old receiving the limbs, lost his arms and right leg when he was 11 after he hit power lines outside his home with an iron rod to scare away pigeons and received an electric shock.

The world’s first double arm transplant was in Germany in 2008, while the first double leg transplant took place in Spain in July 2011.

Taken from Arab News.