Why didn't All Might just get transplants for his damaged organs? Even if they don't have stuff on hand, people would probably totally donate to the world's number one super hero.

transpLAnts volume one mini zine now available in my shop HERE

transpLAnts volume one mini zine now available in my shop HERE

As Drug Deaths Soar, a Silver Lining for Transplant Patients

So far this year, 69 people in New England who died from an overdose have donated their organs, according to the New England Organ Bank. They account for 27 percent of all donations in the region, up sharply from 2010, when eight donors, or 4 percent, were drug users.

Because doctors can use multiple organs from each person, these 69 deceased drug users saved the lives of 202 other people, according to the organ bank.

Nationwide, more than 790 deceased drug users have donated organs this year, accounting for about 12 percent of all donations. That is more than double the 340 drug users who donated in 2010, or about 4 percent of the total, the organ bank said.

“It’s an unexpected silver lining to what is otherwise a pretty horrendous situation,” said Alexandra K. Glazier, chief executive of the New England Organ Bank, which procures organs for transplant in the six New England states and Bermuda.

Researchers keep pig hearts alive in baboons for more than 2 years

For the last 10 years, a facility at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, has housed baboons with pig hearts beating in their abdomens. They’re part of an experiment that researchers there hope will help develop pig organs safe for transplant into people, about 22 of whom die each day in the United States alone while waiting for human organs that are in short supply. Today, those NIH researchers and their collaborators report record-setting survival data for five transplanted pig hearts, one of which remained healthy in a baboon for nearly 3 years. The results—in baboons that kept their original hearts and were regularly given hefty doses of immune-suppressing drugs—aren’t enough to justify testing pig organs in humans yet. But they come as an encouraging piece of evidence for the long-struggling field of cross-species organ transplants, known as xenotransplantation.

“People used to think that this was just some wild experiment and it has no implications,” says Muhammad Mohiuddin, a cardiac transplant surgeon at National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute in Bethesda, who led the study. “I think now we’re all learning that [xenotransplantation in humans] can actually happen.”

In today’s Globe: #Stemcells, #retractions, #cysticfibrosis and #lungtransplants. A keyword fest.

Two items of note, including one from obit writer Bryan Marquard on a patient who survived Mass General’s first living-donor double-lung transplant  which was “so new that no one could venture odds for long-term survival. Mr. Bean was 20 that July day as he lay on the operating table, helping advance science as much as he hoped to extend his life. He was 38 when he died in Mass. General on April…