European Kidney Flown In to Help Karachi Girl

Following a rare initiative involving an international health agency, an airline and the administration of a hospital in Karachi, a kidney was flown in from Europe and transplanted into an 18-year-old Pakistani, Uzma, in the early hours of Sunday.

A patient of end-stage renal disease, Uzma had been on dialysis for the last more than four years at the Sindh Institute of Urology and Transplantation (SIUT), the hospital where she was operated upon. The transplant operation ended at about 2am on Sunday.

According to a statement released by the SIUT, the kidney for the operation came from the body of a 50-year-old woman who died suddenly in a hospital thousands of miles away in Maastricht, The Netherlands. The family of the deceased allowed her kidney to be donated.

Consequently, the Maastricht-based Eurotransplant Foundation - which coordinates cadaver organ donation within six European countries - was informed. No suitable recipient for the kidney, however, could be located in the six European countries…