About two months ago, a significant breakthrough was recorded in the world of medicine, when doctors from the University of Maryland School of Medicine were able to implant a pig’s heart in the body of a patient named David Bennett. During the surgery, which lasted about eight hours, the surgeons took a pig’s heart, genetically modified it and engineered it to fit Bennett’s body.
The operation was considered a very impressive success, and the fact that Bennett’s body did not reject the transplant surprised the doctors for good, since a transplant that lasts more than a month is considered a successful transplant. Despite this, tests performed about 20 days after the operation revealed a virus in Bennett’s body called porcine cytomegalovirus – a virus that usually infects pigs.
At first the doctors thought there was a mistake in the test, due to the minimal amount observed in the tests, but in the tests performed on the 40th day of the operation, the indices showed a significant increase in the level of the virus in Bennett’s body. After another five days the patient’s condition began to deteriorate rapidly, and on the advice of his doctors he took a high amount of antibiotics and antiviral drugs, but unfortunately the patient’s heart stopped beating.
The researchers who performed the transplant say that now they can still not say that the patient died as a result of the invention of the virus in his body, and they will investigate the circumstances of the death and conduct a comprehensive study whose results they will publish later.