The identify of the recipient of the new penis is being kept secret. All that is known is that the recipient is aged 21 and required the procedure following a circumcision that went disastrously wrong. Apparently the man, who was circumcised at the age of 18, was left with less than a quarter of an inch of his original penis. Sky News reports that as many as 250 penis amputations take place every year across South Africa, mostly due to botched circumcisions.
The procedure was performed by surgeons in Cape Town, South Africa working at the Stellenbosch University and Tygerberg Hospital. Previous attempts at transplanting a penis, undertaken in China, have failed. The operation in South Africa took nine hours to complete. According to the Daily Mail, the procedure was reportedly very complex, involving micro-surgery to fix hundreds of blood vessels and nerves. The ability to attach a penis was made possible through pioneering work involving facial transplants.
The procedure is being reported as a success, states The Verge, with the attached organ (which was taken from another man who had recently died) being declared “fully functional.”
One of the surgeons, Andre Van der Merwe, who ordinarily undertakes kidney transplants, told BBC News: “This is definitely much more difficult, the blood vessels are 1.5 mm wide. In the kidney it can be 1 cm.”
The surgeons plan to continue to monitor the man and how the penis functions (to check that there is no risk of rejection by the man’s body.) If the transplant continues to work, further procedures will be attempted in three-months time.
Prior to the surgery being performed there was considerable debate about the ethics of the procedure. The man was not in any life-threatening danger and some medics questioned whether the same time and resources should be allocated to such a procedure compared with those required for a heart transplant. Other medics have countered by saying that running such a procedure skills surgeons for the future, allowing them to undertake procedures which help and improve patients’ lives.
