Blood Type

Philadelphian Robert Zanten (name changed to preserve confidentiality) was on the transplant waiting list for about six hours when he was offered a liver for transplant on June 4. Hall of Fame baseball player? Movie star? Prominent politician? No. Just an ordinary citizen who, like Mickey Mantle, was very sick when placed on the waiting list for a transplant. In fact, since January 1993, 12 percent of liver transplant patients in the Philadelphia region waited two days or less for their transplants.

Philadelphia resident Robert Zanten was on the transplant waiting list for about six hours when he was offered a liver for transplant on June 4. Hall of Fame baseball player? Movie star? Prominent politician? No. Just an ordinary citizen who, like Mickey Mantle, was very sick when placed on the waiting list for a transplant. In fact, since January 1993, 12 percent of local liver transplant patients in the Philadelphia region waited two days or less for their transplants. At least 37 percent of liver transplant patients waited less than a month for their transplants.

A pair of socks found on O.J. Simpson's bedroom floor the day after his ex- wife's murder were stained with blood matching Nicole Brown Simpson's blood type, a police chemist testified yesterday as prosecutors finally arrived at the heart of their case. Gregory Matheson, the assistant director of the Los Angeles police lab, also testified that a blood drop found at the murder scene matched Simpson's type. Only one in every 200 people share Simpson's basic blood chemistry, said Matheson, who offered jurors the strongest evidence yet linking Simpson to the June 12 murders of Nicole Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman.

In a dramatic day of testimony that left jurors looking stunned, prosecutors yesterday presented overwhelming odds linking O.J. Simpson's blood to the scene of his ex-wife's murder. Using statistical estimates of the rarity of Simpson's blood type, biochemist Robin Cotton told jurors that only 1 in 170 million people share the genetic markers found in Simpson's blood and in a blood drop recovered near the bodies of Nicole Brown Simpson and her waiter friend, Ronald Lyle Goldman.

Question: Recently, our son needed an operation and had his blood identified as type O. My wife and other son, as well as myself, are type B. How can parents with the same blood type produce a child with a completely different type? Answer: It's totally possible for you and your wife to be type B and to have a son who's type O. When we refer to blood types like A, B, and O, we're describing the presence or absence of A or B "antigens" - protein substances found on the surface of your red blood cells.

RELATIVES OF A 10-year-old girl, who they say has been denied a life-saving lung transplant because of her age, are appealing to the public in hopes of finding a donor to save their child. "There's unfortunately no options left," said Sharon Ruddock, the aunt of Sarah Murnaghan, who has end-stage cystic fibrosis and has been unable to leave Children's Hospital of Philadelphia for three months, needing a ventilator to breathe. The child is a top candidate for an organ from a pediatric donor but few are available, and family members say that under existing policy, a lung from an adult donor would be offered first to all adults in the region, even those more stable and with less severe conditions.

Trustees of the multimillion-dollar estate of the late Walter C. Pew argued yesterday that a woman claiming to be Pew's daughter is a fraud. Lawyers representing the trustees asked Montgomery County Judge Alfred L. Taxis Jr. to dismiss the claim of Grace Fleming Payne of Cumberland, Md. Payne, 63, filed suit last spring seeking a share of his estate. She contends that she was conceived when her mother, Viola Humbertson Raney, had an affair with Pew in the mid-1920s. Pew, an heir to the Sun Co. fortune, died last year at age 87, leaving an estate worth $142 million.

The state Superior Court says a South Philadelphia man may have been unjustly convicted and sentenced to life in prison for the Christmas day 1989 killing that occurred during a fight between groups of whites and Asians. The court vacated Aun Thuy's sentence and ordered a hearing in Common Pleas Court to review issues raised by his new lawyer. Thuy, 31, formerly of Tasker Street near Broad, was convicted of first- degree murder for the fatal stabbing of James Bischoff, 22, of 16th Street near Morris, on Dec. 25, 1989.

New methods to determine blood type and detect prostate cancer are among the first seven projects to gain investments from BioAdvance, the Philadelphia region's life-sciences greenhouse. The seven will get loans totaling $3.14 million, money that came from Pennsylvania's share of the national settlement with tobacco companies, BioAdvance officials said Friday. BioAdvance, an agency funded last October, is one of three such state-sponsored pools of investment dollars. The others are in Harrisburg and Pittsburgh.

Federal officials reviewing procedures at Mercy Catholic Medical Center's Fitzgerald Mercy Hospital - where two patients died accidentally earlier this month - have expanded their investigation to include a year-old surgical death, state and federal officials said yesterday. In explaining why the investigation was expanded at this time, state officials said they learned about the year-old incident, as well as the November deaths, from recent news reports and then reported them to federal authorities.

RELATIVES OF A 10-year-old girl, who they say has been denied a life-saving lung transplant because of her age, are appealing to the public in hopes of finding a donor to save their child. "There's unfortunately no options left," said Sharon Ruddock, the aunt of Sarah Murnaghan, who has end-stage cystic fibrosis and has been unable to leave Children's Hospital of Philadelphia for three months, needing a ventilator to breathe. The child is a top candidate for an organ from a pediatric donor but few are available, and family members say that under existing policy, a lung from an adult donor would be offered first to all adults in the region, even those more stable and with less severe conditions.

CARLTON CORPREW tried to maintain his composure and not come off like a bad person. But a few people, and one man in particular, kept making negative comments and, finally, Corprew felt compelled to make a pointed comment. "I just kept hearing horror stories. That's all this one guy, especially, was giving me," Corprew said. "I reached the point where I had to tell him, ‘I don't mean any harm by this, but if it's not something positive, I don't want to hear it.'?" That exchange took place late in 2010, a few days after Corprew, an important basketball player for University City High in the 1981-82 season, received a kidney transplant and was undergoing a short stint of follow-up dialysis.

Gayle Levick Goldglantz, 62, of Elkins Park, a medical-practice manager who endured four kidney transplants in a history-making fight for life, died of cancer at Penn Hospice at Rittenhouse on Sunday, Oct. 16, the day before her 40th wedding anniversary. Mrs. Goldglantz discovered she had kidney disease after a blood test for her marriage license in 1971. "The doctors told us we would have a very bleak future," her husband, Harvey, later told The Inquirer. In 1976 and 1977, Mrs. Goldglantz had two kidney transplants from cadavers; the organs were rejected after one month and one week.

Question: Recently, our son needed an operation and had his blood identified as type O. My wife and other son, as well as myself, are type B. How can parents with the same blood type produce a child with a completely different type? Answer: It's totally possible for you and your wife to be type B and to have a son who's type O. When we refer to blood types like A, B, and O, we're describing the presence or absence of A or B "antigens" - protein substances found on the surface of your red blood cells.

BOSTON - A Texas construction worker horribly disfigured in a power-line accident has undergone the nation's first full face transplant in hopes of smiling again and feeling kisses from his 3-year-old daughter. Dallas Wiens, 25, received a new nose, lips, skin, muscle, and nerves from an unidentified dead person in an operation paid for by the U.S. military, which wants to use what is learned to help soldiers with severe facial wounds. Wiens, of Fort Worth, will not resemble "either what he used to be or the donor," but something in between, said plastic surgeon Bohdan Pomahac.

Evan Goldglantz hasn't been able to speak since the accident, so nobody knows exactly what happened that windy November day. His wife, Danielle, says he was remodeling their kitchen in Gloucester City and burning debris in a backyard fireplace when flames touched off a can of gasoline. In an instant, Goldglantz, 27, was engulfed in a fiery explosion that left him with third-degree burns over 92 percent of his body. He's been fighting for his life since in the burn unit of Crozer-Chester Medical Center in Delaware County.

Melodie Gordon wants you to see the "before" picture, first thing. In it: three healthy, smiling children; a good-looking man; and a pretty woman with long, blond, curly hair. Looking at it, a family portrait hanging in her Atco home, Gordon smiles. This is a tough day - her face is swollen and pale, she could have slept all day, and she feels "toxic. " You might not guess that she is the mother in the photograph. Because of the disease that saps her strength and the wait for a new kidney, Gordon, 45, looks like a different woman.

New methods to determine blood type and detect prostate cancer are among the first seven projects to gain investments from BioAdvance, the Philadelphia region's life-sciences greenhouse. The seven will get loans totaling $3.14 million, money that came from Pennsylvania's share of the national settlement with tobacco companies, BioAdvance officials said Friday. BioAdvance, an agency funded last October, is one of three such state-sponsored pools of investment dollars. The others are in Harrisburg and Pittsburgh.

You don't need to have had a lifesaving liver transplant to view the death of the 17-year-old girl given a heart and lungs of the wrong blood type as a tragedy. But my experience with a transplant leads me to ask a troubling question about her parents that raises an issue that society might want to confront. Why did her parents, once she was brain dead, refuse to donate her usable organs? Why shouldn't those seeking transplants agree to donate organs upon their own death? There were many other people bypassed for the heart and two lungs when doctors gave her a second transplant even though she had only a small chance of meaningful recovery.

Who deserves an organ transplant, a precious chance for life? An ailing governor? An aging baseball hero? A poor Mexican girl smuggled into this country by parents so desperate they stood on street corners with tin cans to collect money for their sick child? The death of Jesica Santillan at Duke University Hospital on Saturday is both a crushingly sad tale and a telling one. She waited three years for what turned out to be the wrong organs, intended for a patient with a different blood type but mistakenly given to her in what can only be described as gross human error.