Just months after doctors announced the success of
the most extensive face transplant ever performed,
which gave a severely injured fireman new facial
features, better eyesight, and a full head of hair,
surgeons in the US have announced that they will be
performing the country's first ever p.enis transplant
within a year.

The procedure, which will attempt to transplant a
donor p.enis onto a young military veteran, will be the
third p.enis transplant ever performed. If successful,
the surgical team from Johns Hopkins University
School of Medicine says it will continue to work with
veterans who have suffered traumatic injuries to
their genitals in the field.

According to the US Department of Defense Trauma
Registry, between 2001 and 2013, a total of 1,367
soldiers sustained injuries to their genitals in the line
of duty in Afghanistan or Iraq, mostly due to
homemade bombs detonating nearby. Most of these
soldiers were under 35 years of age, and have to
spend the rest of their lives dealing with a life-
altering injury that people don’t like to talk about.
"These genitourinary injuries are not things we hear
about or read about very often," W. P. Andrew Lee,
the chairman of plastic and reconstructive surgery at
Johns Hopkins, told Denise Grady at The New York
Times. "I think one would agree it is as devastating as
anything that our wounded warriors suffer, for a
young man to come home in his early 20s with the
pelvic area completely destroyed."

The plan is to attach a p.enis from a deceased donor
to the veteran, and within months, restore proper
unitary function, feeling in the organ, and the ability
to have sex and maybe even father children (if the
testes remain). While these are all realistic goals - so
long as the recipient has retained certain nerves,
blood vessels, and his urethra - the success of the
procedure is far from certain.

So far, there have been just two p.enis transplants
performed in the world, and only one of these has
ended in success. The world’s first p.enis transplant
was completed in China in 2006, but two weeks after
the 15-hour procedure to attach a 10-cm donor penis
to the 44-year-old patient, it had to be removed
again.

While the donor p.enis worked fine, restoring urinary
function and the capacity to have sex, the recipient
just couldn’t get past the severe psychological effects
that can come from having someone else’s
appendage attached to your body.
"Because of a severe psychological problem of the
recipient and his wife, the transplanted p.enis
regretfully had to be cut off," Weilie Hu, a surgeon at
Guangzhou General Hospital, told the press at the
time.

The Guardian reported that an examination of the
organ showed no signs of it being rejected by the
body, but more recently, the Johns Hopkins surgeons
told The New York Times that photographs of the
transplant revealed patches of dead and peeling skin,
possibly because the penis had inadequate blood
flow.
"Psychological consequences of hand and face
allografts show that it is not so easy to use and see
permanently a dead person's hands, nor is it easy to
look in a mirror to see a dead person's face," French
surgeon, Jean-Michel Dubernard, who performed the
world's first face transplant in 2006, wrote in the
journal European Urology. "Clearly, in the Chinese
case the failure at a very early stage was first
psychological. It involved the recipient's wife and
raised many questions."

Fortunately, the world’s second penis transplant has
seen greater success so far. Performed on a young
man last year in South Africa, the procedure has not
only seen him regain proper unitary function, but
he’s been able to successfully father a child.
The team at Johns Hopkins has been given
permission to perform 60 penis transplants in the
coming years, and a study will be done on the results
to determine if the procedure can be upgraded from
'experimental' to being made available as a standard
treatment. While the university will be footing the bill
for this particular procedure, the cost would usually
be somewhere between US$200,000 and $400,000,
and at this stage, only army veterans will be eligible.


Recipients will then need to take anti-rejection
medicine for the rest of their lives, and a one-off
infusion of stem cells from the donor.
While some people have criticised the procedure as
unwarranted and non-essential because not having a
penis isn’t a life-threatening condition, doctors and
veterans alike say they cannot overstate the
importance of making procedures like this available.
"I don’t care who you are - military, civilian, anything
- you have an injury like this, it’s more than just a
physical injury," Sgt. First Class Aaron Causey, who
lost both his legs and most of his testicles in
Afghanistan, said to Denise Grady at The New York
Times, adding that the damage to his testicles was by
far more troubling to him than the loss of his legs.

"To be missing the penis and parts of the scrotum is
devastating," Richard J. Redett, director of paediatric
plastic and reconstructive surgery at Johns Hopkins,
told The Times. "That part of the body is so strongly
associated with your sense of self and identity as a
male. These guys have given everything they have.". Source: www.sciencealert.com/america-s-first-penis-transplant-will-be-performed-within-months cc: lalasticlala , Seun , dominique , Ishilove

Pls edit your post properly

switcakes:
Pls edit your post properly

how do u mean pls

Atom57:
how do u mean pls

It won't be the first time.