Would you want a pig to be your salvation?

Jan 01, 2017 News

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By Sharmain Grainger

A major health breakthrough is reportedly on the horizon and its focus is on patients suffering from kidney failure.
This is indeed good news for health sectors across the world, but especially great news for our local health sector, given the fact that it has been exhausting a great deal of its resources to give limited help to kidney failure patients.
If this breakthrough materialises, and it is anticipated that it would by this year-end or early 2018, the trickle-down effect may not reach to our shores for years. But having some hope to look forward to cannot be half as bad as having no hope at all.
There are many Guyanese suffering from kidney failure, and whose only hope of survival currently is dialysis treatment. Once started, dialysis has to become a permanent fixture in the life of a kidney failure patient if they are to maintain a reasonable quality of life.
Their only other option is a kidney transplant.
Herein lies the importance of the potential breakthrough.
You see it isn’t always easy for patients to find a suitable kidney that their body wouldn’t reject. There is the whole required process of cross matching to ensure that donor and recipient cells are compatible.
But even with a willing donor and a kidney that seems to match, there can be complications if the immune system recognises the kidney as a foreign organism and decides to reject it altogether. This can ultimately result in the death of the ailing person who embraced a desperate desire to live.
The looming breakthrough could in fact see a pig being the salvation of many kidney failure patients.
Well at least this is according to an article published just last month by Dr. Louis M. Profeta, an Emergency Physician practicing in Indianapolis.
It comes as no surprise that the article entitled “Doctors may soon transplant a pig kidney to humans – and it could be one of medicine’s biggest breakthroughs” has been gaining immense attention in the global medical fraternity.
The potential breakthrough is being spearheaded by Transplant Surgeon, Dr. Joseph Tector, and his laboratory at the University of Alabama.
According to Dr. Profeta, in his article while “scientists have started to make huge inroads through cloning, the model that seems the most promising is not a primate such as a monkey or chimp. Instead the animal that holds the most promise of all potential animal donors is of all things the pig”.
But what makes the pig the most suitable potential donor, according to Dr. Profeta, is the fact that scientists have been able to accomplish the incredible feat of removing those proteins from pig cells that are most responsible for rejection. The outcome, he pointed out, is that “these pig kidneys, on the cellular level, are coming close to being indistinguishable from human”.
Even more surprising and what is probably heartening to many in desperate need of a kidney is Dr. Profeta’s claim that with the rejection proteins gone, the human and pig kidney are so close that they may not even need to be matched. “You can essentially put the same kidney into…well anybody,” is the shocking revelation of Dr. Profeta.
But despite all the efforts currently being put into ensuring that a pig’s kidney is virtually “unrejectable”, there are some who, upon learning of the possibility of this breakthrough, have already started to reject this notion – be it in their minds or verbally. This is due to the fact that some people embrace the belief, religious or otherwise, that the pig is an unclean animal. Even the Holy Bible in Leviticus made reference to the pig as an unclean animal because of its cloven feet.
According to some reports, “in some religions an unclean animal is an animal whose consumption or handling is taboo.” In fact it has been noted that “according to these religions, persons who handle such animals may need to ritually purify themselves to get rid of their perceived “uncleanness”. This religious theory begs the question, “if an individual receives a transplanted kidney from a pig to save his or her life does it mean that individual is permanently unclean?”
My opinion, therefore, is that accepting this potential breakthrough will more than likely be dependent on how badly a kidney failure patient desires to live.
According to Dr. Profeta, once the pig kidney becomes feasible, he envisages pigs being cloned for the purpose of transplantation and facilities being dedicated to just this purpose. In fact he has already started to embrace the possibility of other organs such as heart and liver being similarly produced. But this whole breakthrough is still yet to be seen, and, in the meantime, we have to look forward with hope to the day that fewer or no lives are lost because of the want of a failed organ.
In the interim though, our local Minister of Public Health, Dr. George Norton, is promoting healthy behavioural changes as a means to reduce or prevent an increasing number of kidney failure patients.
While the main causes of renal failure are diabetes and high blood pressure, the public health sector is looking to advance its efforts by raising awareness about how patients can control their sugar and pressure, thereby helping to prevent some cases of kidney failure.
Reducing the cases of this condition is particularly important, since according to Minister Norton sustaining treatment for kidney failure patients is an almost impossible task for our ‘developing-country’ economy.
In the past, kidney failure patients were afforded financial support from the Ministry of Health, which covered about 40 sessions of dialysis at a private institution per year. However, the high cost of offering this service had caused the Ministry to revise its financial support, whereby patients are only offered a one-off cheque of $360,000 which can cover about 40 sessions.
After these sessions are completed, many patients can ill-afford to continue dialysis treatment.
Approximately 110 patients, between the ages of 14 and 75, have passed through the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation’s dialysis unit during the past three years, according to Kidney Transplant Surgeon, Dr. Kishore Persaud.

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