The surgical miracles of 2018 you may have missed

Liver transplant from an HIV-positive donor to an HIV-negative child

Historically, people living with HIV have been banned from donating organs over possibilities that the virus could be transmitted through a donated issue. But a South African mother recently pleaded with doctors at the Wits Donald Gordon Medical Centre in Johannesburg to re-examine the above and has since made the hospital the first in the world to transplant a liver from an HIV-positive donor to an HIV-negative child. The HIV-infected mother had watched her baby with end-stage liver disease deteriorate while waiting for a liver transplant for 180 days.

The woman would have been able to transplant a portion of her liver to her child had she not been infected with HIV. South Africa has previously chalked successes in transplants between people with HIV but what makes this operation different is the fact that it is the first liver donation from a living HIV-positive donor in the country as previous donors were deceased.