A Life-Saving Lung

Scott Wilson of Boca Raton, Fla. , was "as close to being dead as he could be without being dead," according to Surgeon Frank Veith of Montefiore Medical Center in New York City. Wilson, 25, a landscaper and father of four, was spraying weeds with the herbicide paraquat on Aug. 30, when the equipment apparently malfunctioned and he accidentally inhaled the toxic chemical. Paraquat lodges in the muscle tissue and travels in the blood to the lungs, where it does continual damage as long as it remains in the body. After steadily declining in a Florida hospital, Wilson was transferred to Montefiore in a final effort to save his life. There, doctors continued to remove the poison from his system by filtering his blood through charcoal. But it was too late; the paraquat had already done drastic harm to Wilson's lungs. His only hope: a lung transplant.

Since 1963, doctors around the world have attempted 50 such operations implants of which were performed by Veith at Montefiore), but only in the past few years, with the introduction of cyclosporine, a drug that helps prevent the rejection of foreign tissue, have patients survived more than a year. At present the only survivor besides Wilson is another paraquat victim, who had two lungs transplanted in separate operations several weeks ago in Toronto. One limiting factor for lung transplants is the lack of suitable donors. Wilson, however, was lucky. The lungs of Thomas Riso, 19, an auto-accident victim who matched Wilson in size and blood type, became available. Rise's right lung was infected with pneumonia, but the left was healthy enough to be transferred. It was artificially inflated, drained of blood and filled instead with a cold fluid that kept it at a temperature close to freezing during the 93-min. interval between excision and implantation. The entire procedure took six hours and involved five surgeons, three anesthesiologists, two pulmonary specialists and 15 nurses and technicians. At week's end Wilson, though still in critical condition, was awake, responsive and watching television.

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