Jérôme Hamon, the first man in the world to have undergone a second face transplant in 2018, after the one in 2010, due to a genetic disease that had deformed his face, neurofibromatosis type 1, has died in France.
Following the rejection and the new transplant, an experiment never attempted before, he became the first man in the world to have lived with three different faces.
The 49-year-old, his doctor said, "was exhausted".
The 2018 transplant was carried out by Professor Laurent Lantieri's team at the "Georges Pompidou" hospital in Paris. The same surgeon had already performed the first transplant, also a world first, in 2010 at the "Henri Mondor" hospital. In that case, the transplant was a success, as he himself recounted in a book published in April 2015. But in the same year, for a banal cold, he was treated with an antibiotic incompatible with the immunosuppressants that were essential for him to live and l The following year he began to show signs of rejection and his face became deformed. The following year, the decision to try the transplant again, given that the face undergoing rejection showed signs of necrosis. While waiting for the operation, Hamon spent two months "faceless" in intensive care at the hospital, waiting for a compatible donor. In the end, the donor was a 22-year-old young man who died hundreds of kilometers from Paris.
(Unioneonline/ss)
