Candidates Selected to UndergoFirst Face Transplant Procedure
Makeover Madness
Facelift of the future?
You know how I love to report on the science fiction-ish in real life. So how’s this for a true-life tale from the likes of Orwell, Isaac Asimov, or Philip K. Dick
Instead of mere facelifts, we may soon be able to get whole new faces.
I assure you, it’s not fiction. According to an Associated Press report from last month, 12 potential candidates – 5 men and 7 women with burned or disfigured faces – have been pre-selected to interview for the opportunity to undergo the world’s first face transplant procedure. A medical clinic in Cleveland, Ohio, has been given the go-ahead to attempt the operation by its Institutional Review Board after a team of doctors located there have laid the groundwork for years.
According to the article, the 8-10 hour procedure should not be overly complicated, but the risk are considerable. Infections, rejection, and psychological ramifications are likely, and a lifelong course of anti-rejection drugs will raise any transplant beneficiary’s risk of kidney damage and cancer. And to be fair about it, conventional facial reconstructive surgery carries a lot of the same risks – and instead of one procedure, can be dozens, even hundreds, over a lifetime
Still, the clinic had no trouble at all finding candidates for the procedure. Two operations have been scheduled, with the third pending at the time of this writing. The lead doctor, a 50-year-old surgical veteran from Europe, says her paramount concern is not whether she is the first to successfully complete the surgery (other groups of doctors around the world are planning similar operations), but finding the very best candidate for the procedure.
According to her, it’ll be someone who’s truly disfigured, not just scarred, but with enough control of existing facial muscles to be able to use a new face fully. Said patient will also be emotionally stable, with no history of suicidal thought, long-term depression, or drug or alcohol abuse. The “right person” will also be psychologically hardy – able to bear up under the shock of seeing a new face in the mirror and the anticipated guilt of feeling as though they’ve slipped into a dead person’s identity
But to answer everyone’s most obvious question: It’s anticipated that after healing, transplant recipients will bear much less of a resemblance to donors than what might be the case in sci-fi books or movies. According to the team, underlying bone structure changes facial dynamics quite a bit, as do the “set” and nuances of individual facial expression, which doesn’t come with a face, but with a person
Still, it gives new meaning to the term “dead ringer,” doesn’t it?
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Pest of yesteryear bugs major hotel chains
Traveling anytime soon? You might want to think twice about the motel or budget motor lodge – or else “rough it” in your RV or tent
Why? Because the bedbugs are biting!
Yep, according to a Reuters story from a few weeks ago, recent years have seen a huge jump in the nighttime nibbler most everyone assumes left the scene when straw mattresses went by the wayside. But if the rising number of bedbug-related complaints (and even lawsuits) against hotel chains and 2004’s 20% increase in bedbug calls to major pest control firms are any indication, these biters are back with a vengeance.
According to the piece, entomologists can’t say precisely why these once-rare pests (they were all but rubbed out in the U.S. by the 1950s) are on the rise once again, but some experts theorize that the abandonment of the world’s most effective pesticides, DDT, could be partially to blame
Hmmm. Where have we heard THAT sentiment echoed before?
Unlike the mosquitoes that so readily carry deadly diseases like malaria and West Nile (and that are now also flourishing in the absence of DDT), bedbugs can’t cause any serious or permanent harm – just the red welts and itching the popular bedtime saying warns against. But that doesn’t mean we should let them share our beds with us, does it?
If only DDT were sold in “travel sized” spray cans. Ah, probably too much to wish for
Facing the facts that are biting us in the butt,
William Campbell Douglass II, MD
