Aids Experiments On The Unborn
Doctors in Florida and California plan to use 20 pre-born babies as guinea pigs to see whether the drug AZT, given to their AIDS-infected mothers, will prevent infection in the babies.
A child born to an AIDS-infected mother has an approximately 50 per cent chance of being born with the virus. AZT is not a cure for AIDS, but it appears to prolong the life of some AIDS patients.
Fetal transplants
Controversy has raged for some time over the use of fetal-tissue transplants. It was claimed that Parkinson’s disease could be reversed by transplant of fetal-brain tissue, but the procedure requires that the brain tissue must be alive. The fact, therefore, is that the fetus is not legally brain dead when its tissue is removed.
Experience is now proving that fetal tissue transplants are not the cure-all they are claimed to be, and recent scientific publications such as The Lancet have stressed their negative results. Speaking of fetal pancreas transplants the Chairman of Surgery at Cambridge University stated: “About 100 have been performed today, but not one has done ay good.
A Chicago doctor was quoted in The Observer, May 1, 1988, as saying of fetal grain-cell transplants: “Patients require further drug treatment. It is certainly no miracle cure, as we were led to believe.”
Meanwhile, a recent editorial in The Lancet has called for a halt to fetal-brain-cell transplants until existing cases were fully assessed over then or twenty years. AIDS transmitted through bone transplant.
Full-blown AIDS
In what is believed to be the first known case of its kind, an American woman has developed full-blown AIDS four years after she received a bone transplant during an operation for curvature of the spine. She did not receive a blood transfusion during the operation.
Although the AIDS virus is known to have been transmitted through kidney, heart, pancreas and skin transplants, as well as through artificial insemination, it is the first time it has been transmitted through a bone transplant.
The case also marks the first time that a person who has been infected with the virus through a transplant operation has gone on to develop fully the disease, according to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.
The possibility of infection through such a source is now said to be very rare, since all tissue used for transplants has been tested for the AIDS virus since 1985. However, doctors warn that there is a “small possibility” that infection can happen after transplants because the virus can remain hidden from screening tests for some time after the donor has become infected.
There are not reported cases of AIDS infection following transplants in Canada, although a man who recently had a heart transplant at Toronto Western Hospital is being monitored for possible infection.
