Transplant | featured news

Katie and Dalton Prager, a young couple who both have cystic fibrosis, celebrated happy news when they reunited Tuesday afternoon after nearly five months apart: Katie is on her way to getting a lifesaving lung transplant.

The fact that it took over a year for the recipient to begin to show symptoms threw investigators off, as usually rabies develops within a month or two. Health officials confirmed Friday that a Maryland man who received a donated kidney more than a year ago contracted rabies and died from it.

Two Swedish women may be able to bear children using the wombs which carried them, doctors say, hailing the world's first mother-daughter uterus transplants.

Doreen Flynn is the mother of three young girls with an incurable blood disorder called Fanconi anemia. Jordan, 13, and twins Jorja and Julia, 7, will all need bone transplants to survive. Their mother fears there won’t be a match for her girls when the time comes. Or worse, that if a match is found that the donor won’t follow through and donate. She has reason to worry - some experts say that nearly half of donors don’t follow through with donation. So she has become the lead plaintiff in a case that she hopes will change medical history and make it legal to pay bone marrow donors. In doing so, she’s also taking aim at a long held position by the medical establishment that people who provide bone marrow should be altruistic – and not in it for the money.

It turns out you can recycle just about anything these days - even kidneys and other organs donated for transplants. Recently in Chicago, in what is believed to be the first documented case of its kind in the U.S., a transplanted kidney that was failing was removed from a patient while he was still alive and given to somebody else.

Doctors say it is unlikely that former Vice President Dick Cheney got special treatment when he was given a new heart that thousands of younger people also were in line to receive.

Ten months after becoming the first person to get a full face transplant in the U.S., a man marvels at recovering the ability of expression.

Chimp attack victim Charla Nash says she's venturing out more after receiving a face transplant six months ago. She told NBC's "Today" show that her donor face has begun molding to her bone structure - and has begun receiving compliments on her appearance.

After Richard Mangino lost his arms below the elbows and legs below the knees from sepsis in 2002, he longed to be able to feel his grandchildren’s faces and stroke their hair. Now, he'll get the chance to do that due to a double hand transplant.

They savor pizza and burgers, no longer frighten children, and many of them can walk the streets without people knowing they have someone else's cheeks, nose, lips and skin. People who have had face transplants increasingly are going public, helping to transform an operation that six years ago was daredevil theory into one that is widely accepted....