LILLE, France:The world’s first face transplant recipient, Frenchwoman Isabelle Dinoire, died in April “after a long illness,” a French hospital said Tuesday.
In 2005, at the age of 38, Dinoire received a graft comprising the nose, lips and chin of a brain-dead donor to replace parts of her face that had been mauled by her dog.
The hospital in Amiens, northern France, confirmed the death of “Mrs D., the first patient in the world to receive a face transplant in an operation carried out by Professor (Bernard) Devauchelle and his teams on November 27, 2005.”
The hospital said her death had been kept quiet to protect her family’s privacy.
Le Figaro newspaper reported that Dinoire’s body had rejected the transplant last year “and she had lost part of the use of her lips.”
The drugs that she had to take to prevent her body from rejecting the transplant left her susceptible to cancer, and two cancers had developed, the report said.
In a remarkable news conference in February 2006, just three months after the operation, the blonde, blue-eyed mother of two appeared before TV cameras wearing a black top and pink cardigan.
She appeared to be wearing thick makeup to disguise the scars of the procedure.
Her lips were heavy and inflexible, and she spoke with a pronounced lisp but was otherwise comprehensible.
She recounted how she had fainted after “taking medicines to forget” personal problems.
“When I woke up, I tried to light a cigarette and I couldn’t understand why it didn’t stay between my lips. Then I saw the pool of blood and the dog next to me,” she said.
“I went to look in the mirror and was horrified.”
But the ground-breaking operation gave her a new lease of life.
“Since my operation I have a face, like everyone... I will be able to resume a normal life,” the divorcee said.
The operation was led by Jean-Michel Dubernard, a world-renowned surgeon at Edouard Herriot hospital in the eastern city of Lyon, and Devauchelle, a professor of facial surgery.
Dubernard had performed the world’s first hand transplant in September 1998, followed by the first double hand and forearm transplant in January 2000.
The transplant team came under fire from within the French medical profession for releasing post-operation pictures of the patient.
Frenchwoman who received first face transplant dies
Frenchwoman who received first face transplant dies
After nearly 7 weeks and many rumors, Bolivia’s ex-leader reappears in his stronghold
- Morales was Bolivia’s first Indigenous president who served from 2006 until his fraught 2019 ouster and subsequent self-exile
- He dismissed rumors fueled by local politicians and fanned by social media that he would try to flee the country
LA PAZ: Bolivia’s long-serving socialist former leader, Evo Morales, reappeared Thursday in his political stronghold of the tropics after almost seven weeks of unexplained absence, endorsing candidates for upcoming regional elections and quieting rumors he had fled the country in the wake of the US seizure of his ally, Venezuela’s ex-President Nicolás Maduro.
The weeks of hand-wringing over Morales’ fate showed how little the Andean country knows about what’s happening in the remote Chapare region, where the former president has spent the past year evading an arrest warrant on human trafficking charges, and how vulnerable it is to fears about US President Donald Trump’s potential future foreign escapades.
The media outlet of Morales’ coca-growing union, Radio Kawsachun Coca, released footage of Morales smiling in dark sunglasses as he arrived via tractor at a stadium in the central Bolivian town of Chimoré to address his supporters.
Morales, Bolivia’s first Indigenous president who served from 2006 until his fraught 2019 ouster and subsequent self-exile, explained that he had come down with chikungunya, a mosquito-borne ailment with no treatment that causes fever and severe joint pain, and suffered complications that “caught me by surprise.”
“Take care of yourselves against chikungunya — it is serious,” the 66-year-old Morales said, appearing markedly more frail than in past appearances.
He dismissed rumors fueled by local politicians and fanned by social media that he would try to flee the country, vowing to remain in Bolivia despite the threat of arrest under conservative President Rodrigo Paz, whose election last October ended nearly two decades of rule by Morales’ Movement Toward Socialism party.
“Some media said, ‘Evo is going to leave, Evo is going to flee.’ I said clearly: I am not going to leave. I will stay with the people to defend the homeland,” he said.
Paz’s revival of diplomatic ties with the US and recent efforts to bring back the Drug Enforcement Administration — some 17 years after Morales expelled American anti-drug agents from the Andean country while cozying up to China, Russia, Cuba and Iran — have rattled the coca-growing region that serves as Morales’ bastion of support.
Paz on Thursday confirmed that he would meet Trump in Miami on March 7 for a summit convening politically aligned Latin American leaders as the Trump administration seeks to counter Chinese influence and assert US dominance in the region.
Before proclaiming the candidates he would endorse in Bolivia’s municipal and regional elections next month, Morales launched into a lengthy speech reminiscent of his once-frequent diatribes against US imperialism.
“This is geopolitical propaganda on an international scale,” he said of Trump’s bid to revive the Monroe Doctrine from 1823 in order to reassert American dominance in the Western Hemisphere. “They want to eliminate every left-wing party in Latin America.”
