EMILY TSANG EMILY.TSANG@SCMP.COM
PUBLISHED : Friday, 28 August, 2015, 4:07pm
UPDATED : Friday, 28 August, 2015, 4:07pm
Prince of Wales Hospital in Sha Tin. Photo: Wikipedia
An incident in which two patients received organ transplants from a stroke victim who was posthumously found to have had cancer was an “unfortunate event” rather than a “medical blunder”, said the chairman of a Hong Kong public hospital’s transplant committee.
Doctors had done all the necessary check-ups on the organs – a heart and a pair of lungs – after harvesting and they were deemed suitable for transplantation, said Dr Philip Li Kam-tao of Prince of Wales Hospital in Sha Tin.
The heart and lungs were in the process of being transplanted on two patients at Queen Mary Hospital when doctors at Prince of Wales harvesting the kidneys found a 1.5cm diameter lump on the organs, later determined to be cancer. A planned kidney transplant was shelved.
“The doctors followed the procedure and conducted necessary medical examinations on the organs … which were in accordance with international guidelines,” Li told an RTHK radio programme today.
“But since the lump was so small and the body size of the deceased was quite big, it was possible that the lump was not detected by ultrasound [examinations]. There was nothing else we could do.
“It was most definitely not a mistake, but an unfortunate event.”
Li said organ transplantation was always a procedure in which every minute and second counted, as the recipients were usually in a life-threatening condition.
The patients and their families were notified of the risk of receiving organ donations and had signed a consent form. Li said the risk of passing cancer to organ recipients was lower than 0.1 per cent, and that doctors had to consider the risk and benefit of such procedures to the recipients.
But he stressed that the organ transplants would not have taken place if the cancer had been discovered earlier in the medical assessment.
http://m.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/health-environment/article/1853427/cancer-found-hong-kong-organ-donor-unfortunate
