Kanyi Okeke
A 52-year-old smoker’s lungs were rejected for transplant because of it’s scary condition.
Photos of the lungs dubbed by social media users as ‘the best anti-smoking ad ever’ shows horrific-looking black damaged lungs.
The photos and video has gone viral round the world and people are saying, ‘’if you’ve ever picked up a cigarette, or thought about smoking, look at the photos first’’.
In pictures trending worldwide, Doctor Chen Jingyu and his transplant team are seen inspecting the tar-blackened lungs at Wuxi People’s Hospital in China’s eastern Jiangsu Province.
Doctor Chen, a leading lung transplant surgeon and also vice president at the hospital, said the donor was only 52 years of age when he was declared brain dead and his organs donated.
Using the hashtag ‘jieyan’ which in Mandarin means ‘quit smoking’ Doctor Chen wrote:
Many smokers in this country have lungs which look like this. Our team decided to reject these lungs for transplant. If you’re a heavy smoker, your lungs may not be accepted even if you choose to donate them after death. Look at these lungs – do you still have the courage to smoke?
The patient didn’t undergo a CT scan before his death – he was simply declared brain dead, and his lungs were swiftly harvested.
In his explanations, Doctor Chen wrote:
Initial oxygenation index tests were OK, but when we harvested the organs, we realised we wouldn’t be able to use them. We Chinese love smoking. It would be impractical to say that we wouldn’t accept the lungs of all smokers, but there are strict standards.
These include lungs under 60 years of age in a patient who has only recently been declared medically dead; minor infections in the lungs and relatively clean chest X-rays are also acceptable. If the above conditions are met, we would consider transplanting the lungs.
In 2017, the World Health Organization reported that worldwide tobacco use causes 7 million deaths per year.
