A donor heart, airlifted from Chandigarh, was safely transferred to Fortis Escorts Heart Institute here in two hours, thanks to a green corridor. A green corridor created on Thursday covered a distance of 18 km from Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International (IGI) airport to the Fortis Escorts Heart Institute in just 18 minutes, said a release on Friday.
The donor, a 32-year-old female from Faridabad, was declared brain dead after being on ventilator support for three weeks at Post Graduate Institute Hospital in Chandigarh. The heart was successfully transplanted on a 13-year-old teenager from Agra, who was suffering from a heart failure due to viral myocarditis and also had an ejection fraction of barely 15-20 per cent, whereas normal heart functions at 55-60 per cent.
“When we first heard that the donor was a 32-year-old person, it looked that the match might not be possible. However, the body weight of the donor matched with the recipient and hence their chest cavities were nearly comparable, though we still had to use special techniques to connect arteries of the donor heart with those of the recipient,” ZS Meharwal, Director (Cardiovascular Surgery and Transplant Surgery), Fortis Escorts Heart Institute, said in a statement on Friday.
The donor’s family consented to donate heart, kidneys and liver, following which the harvested heart was flown down to Delhi by a chartered flight.
“It was unfortunate that we did not get the cooperation from the commercial airlines in bringing the heart from Chandigarh to Delhi, and thus did so in a chartered flight,” said Ashok Seth, Chairman at Fortis Escorts Heart Institute.
“I would urge the Ministry of Civil Aviation to consider regulations in which all stakeholders, including airlines, develop policies to become an integral part of this life-saving effort,” Seth said.
“From terminal 1D to Escorts Hospital, a corridor of 18 km was provided. The organ was ferried in 18 minutes. The journey began at 1:05 pm and ended at 1:23 pm,” the official said.
In another such case, the heart of a 45-year-old man was on Friday transplanted into a 20-year-old youth at All India Institute of Medical Scienceshere for which a 17.5 km-long green corridor was made by the authorities. The organ was flown from Chandigarh to Delhi airport, from where it was taken to AIIMS in 27 minutes.
“The man had sustained brain injury after suffering a fall. We were intimated by NOTTO (National Organ and Tissue Transplant Organisation) and a team of doctors went to Chandigarh by a flight last night. They harvested the heart from the brain dead patient this morning around 5 am and came back to Delhi. It was then transplanted into a 20-year-old young man, who suffers from dilated cardiomyopathy,” said Dr Balram Airan, Dean, AIIMS and chief of the Cardio-Thorasic Centre. The man was declared dead at PGI, Chandigarh and the family agreed to donate his heart, he added.
“From T3 terminal at IGI Airport, we provided a green corridor of 17.5 km. The journey to AIIMS from the airport began at 8:50 am and ended at 9:17 am,” a senior official of the Delhi Traffic Police Department said.
The laying of two green corridors comes two days after a controversy erupted over an ambulance carrying a bleeding child allegedly being stopped near Indira Gandhi indoor stadium in Central Delhi due to a VIP movement.