Heart surgeon rebuked

Press, 27 July 1981, Page 9

Heart surgeon rebuked

NZPA Houston. Texas A 36-year-old Dutch bus driver who was given an artificial heart in Houston, Texas, was in a critical condition yesterday as Government authorities criticised the heart surgeon, Denton Cooley, for implanting the device without permission. Officials at St Luke’s Hospital where the operation was performed last week by a team led by Dr Cooley.

identified the patient as W. A. Meuffels of the Netherlands. It was only the third time an artificial heart has been transplanted into a human. The first operation, in 1969, u’as also carried out by Dr Cooley. The first patient survived with the heart for 65 hours but died 36 hours after being given a real one. An other operation was carried out in Argentina. The Federal Food and Drug Aministration indicated

at the week-end that Dr Cooley had broken the law in not asking its permission to use a device considered still in the experimental stage. But Dr Cooley said Mr Meuffels had no" chance of living without the operation. He said the decision to implant the artificial heart — an aluminium and plastic device which is linked to a machine and which runs on compressed air — was taken when Mr Meuffels’s own heart stopped beating three

hours after a cardiac operation. “We had every indication to use the artificial heart,” Dr Cooley said. He added that Mr Meuffels’s wife had given her permission for the operation to be performed. The surgeon pointed out that the artificial heart was only a temporary measure to save Mr Meuffels’s life. He said a search was now on for a suitable donor for a realheart transplant.