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8-Year-Old Makes History As First Pediatric Dual Hand Transplant Recipient

Slashdot: Science - Fetched: July 30th, 2015, 10:00am UTC

ErnieKey writes: While there have been several hand transplants that have successfully taken place over the past decade or so, a little boy in Maryland, named Zion Harvey has become the first successful pediatric dual hand transplant recipient. After losing both hands and feet due to infection when he was 2 years old, doctors were able to successfully transplant new hands onto the little boy, thanks in part to modern-day 3d printing technology. "The success of Penn's first bilateral hand transplant on an adult, performed in 2011, gave us a foundation to adapt the intricate techniques and coordinated plans required to perform this type of complex procedure on a child," Dr. L. Scott Levin, chairman of the department of orthopedic surgery at Penn Medicine and director of the hand transplantation program at Children's Hospital, said in a statement.pdiv class="share_submission" style="position:relative;" a class="slashpop" href="http://twitter.com/home?status=8-Year-Old+Makes+History+As+First+Pediatric+Dual+Hand+Transplant+Recipient%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2F1JxAs5h"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a a class="slashpop" href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fscience.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F15%2F07%2F30%2F0217229%2F8-year-old-makes-history-as-first-pediatric-dual-hand-transplant-recipient%3Futm_source%3Dslashdot%26utm_medium%3Dfacebook"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a class="nobg" href="http://plus.google.com/share?url=http://science.slashdot.org/story/15/07/30/0217229/8-year-old-makes-history-as-first-pediatric-dual-hand-transplant-recipient?utm_source=slashdotamp;utm_medium=googleplus" onclick="javascript:window.open(this.href,'', 'menubar=no,toolbar=no,resizable=yes,scrollbars=yes,height=600,width=600');return false;"img src="http://www.gstatic.com/images/icons/gplus-16.png" alt="Share on Google+"//a /div/ppa href="http://science.slashdot.org/story/15/07/30/0217229/8-year-old-makes-history-as-first-pediatric-dual-hand-transplant-recipient?utm_source=rss1.0moreanonamp;utm_medium=feed"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~4/7kbaFv3qOQg" height="1" width="1" alt=""/

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