Posted by Al Gordon on December 05, 1997 at 10:37:34:
In Reply to: Pancreas Extraction posted by Tomokazu Ise on November 30, 1997 at 21:10:13:
Thank you for your interesting posting. Regarding your question as to why these transplant surgeons used human rather than pig islets, I can only assume that they had no experience with xenotransplantation and that the regulatory authorities have not yet accepted xenotransplantation as an approved procedure. Also, if one has a ready supply of human islets, it makes sense to use them, even though human islets will only ever help a very small number of people with diabetes.
Am I correct in assuming that these transplants were only islets, and not kidney/islets together with immunosuppression?
Your comments on Shabu-Shabu are interesting. I have enjoyed Shabu-Shabu several times in Japan, a did not realize what it was. As for the risk of transplanting pig islets, there is obviously a difference between taking in cooked dead pig tissue as opposed to living islets. I would be curious to know if anyone could comment on whether cooking for a few seconds would kill viruses and retroviruses that would be present in the pork. If not, then there may be millions of people in the world today who have already provided a pathway for PERV infection, and have been unaffected by it. Is there anybody out there who could help us on this one?
As for the Japanese pork industry's ability to supply virus-free pigs, I would be curious to see if these pig's are also free of retroviruses, particularly PERV. Retroviruses are found in the genome of many animals, including humans, but do not lead to infection.
In any case, many researchers that I talk to believe that, since actual in vivo PERV infection has never been shown, we are dealing with a theoretical and negligible risk, and that pathways for PERV infection have existed for thousands of years. If there were to have been a risk of infection, we would likely have seen it by now.
Al