Birmingham medics in kidney transplant mercy trip to Africa

Aug 16 2009 by Alison Dayani, Sunday Mercury

THE odds were stacked against them.

But two desperately ill African teenagers have fought back from an imminent death sentence after a groundbreaking mercy mission by Birmingham doctors.

Ill-equipped Nigerian medics had kept Christian Francis, 17, and 14 year-old Joseph Iniovosa alive on expensive dialysis machines until the Midlands team could fly in to perform the first ever kidney transplant on children in sub-Saharan Africa.

And within days of the surgery, the boys were up in their beds with a new lease of life, embracing tearful parents and brothers.

Yet the poverty-stricken youngsters would have been dead within weeks if it were not for surgeon Andrew Ready and colleagues Dr Simon Ball and Dr Dwomoa Adu.

The flying medics gave up their own holiday time from Birmingham’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital to carry out the vital operations for charity Transplant Links.

Kidney disease in Africa is approaching epidemic levels with sufferers having worse prospects than victims of HIV or Aids, dying quickly within months.

In Nigeria alone, one in every five people has kidney disease. And with no NHS, penniless patients like Joseph and Christian cannot afford expensive dialysis – as there is only ONE dialysis machine to every million people.

Jennie Jewitt-Harris, chief executive of Transplant Links, helped organise last week’s lifesaving mission in the Third World.

“We came to Nigeria a few years ago to teach surgeons how to do keyhole surgery on adults,’’ Jennie tells me, speaking from Lagos.

‘‘But then we got a desperate call a few months ago from them saying two boys were extremely sick and would die without our help. “They had never done any transplants on children before, but they had raised enough money to keep them alive until we could organise a team to get there and show them how to do it. You can’t ignore something like that.

“Thankfully, both transplants were successful and the kidneys started working straight away.