Hospital performs face transplant
A Boston hospital has performed the second face transplant in the US, medics said.
The recipient was a man who suffered traumatic facial injuries from a freak accident.
A hospital spokesman said the 17-hour operation took place in Thursday at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women's Hospital.
A team led by plastic surgeon Dr Bohdan Pomahac replaced the man's nose, palate, upper lip and some skin, muscles and nerves with those of a dead donor.
The hospital would not identify the donor or the recipient.
The first US face transplant was done in December by doctors at Cleveland Clinic, who replaced 80% of a woman's face with that from a female corpse.
The woman's identity has not been revealed, nor the circumstances which led to the transplant, except that her injury occurred several years ago.
The woman left the Cleveland hospital in February, and her progress was described as astonishing by her doctors.
The Boston surgery is the world's seventh face transplant, as an operation once considered the stuff of science fiction is suddenly becoming more common.
Last weekend in Paris, doctors performed the world's first simultaneous face and hand transplant on a man who suffered severe burns. In that case, doctors replaced the upper half of the man's face and both his hands, all the parts coming from a brain-dead donor. French doctors also carried out the very first face transplant, successfully performed in 2005 on a French woman.
