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Kolkata:
Doctors at personal hospitals in West Bengal’s Kolkata are making use of a distinct approach to assist sure sufferers with extreme COVID-19 signs like pneumonia when even ventilators fail to assist with their restoration.
Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation or ECMO, used historically for coronary heart surgical procedures in youngsters, is now serving to hospitals in Kolkata after medical doctors in Gujarat’s Ahmedabad registered some success.
Experts have urged authorities hospitals in Bengal to undertake the identical approach.
Abhimanyu Lal, 54, was contaminated with coronavirus in May and spent 10 days on the ECMO at Medica Superspeciality Hospital in south Kolkata. His lungs have been severely compromised and the ECMO acted as a synthetic lung whereas his personal healed. For Mr Lal’s household, his restoration was a miracle.
Mr Lal’s 28-year-old son Rahul had by no means heard of the ECMO earlier than. “The machine was next to god. God were the doctors and the whole team that saved my father.”
The survivor, who owns a dairy enterprise, mentioned: “This (COVID-19) is a dangerous disease. I only pray no one gets it.”
Mr Lal was among the many 14 COVID-19 sufferers who have been placed on ECMO at Medica hospital — 4 of them are nonetheless on the machine, two are awaiting discharge and 5 have recovered. Three of the sufferers, nonetheless, died throughout remedy.
Around 15 years in the past, when swine flu hit UK and Australia, ECMO outperformed ventilators, in accordance with Dr Arpan Chakraborty, the vital care marketing consultant who is likely one of the key leaders on the ECMO workforce.
“In 2005-06, a landmark trial came out where ECMO saved 50 per cent more patients than the ventilator,” he defined. “Usually the lung is like a balloon. It becomes like a brick because of severe COVID-19 pneumonia. At that time there is no option but to rest the lung by taking its action to the ECMO machine and rest the native lung so that it can recover and take over its own faction function after 14 days,” Dr Chakraborty mentioned.
The ECMO requires large workforce effort, with at the least 20 to 25 folks working around the clock together with nurses, hospital cleaners, perfusionists and medical doctors.
The machine drains the blood from the affected person’s physique, attracts out the carbon dioxide from the blood, warms it to physique temperature and places it again into circulation. It is used as a coronary heart and lung machine in ICUs. The machine itself doesn’t deal with COVID-19 however the well being issues that the virus triggers.
A 24-year-old girl with COVID-19 was handled at AMRI Hospital at Dhakuria in Kolkata, utilizing ECMO. She was discharged on June eight after 300 hours on the machine.
A COVID-19 affected person in Delhi and one other in Chennai, nonetheless, died regardless of being placed on the ECMO.
Delhi has used ECMO for 5 sufferers, Maharashtra’s Mumbai for 9, Ahmedabad for 11 and Kolkata for 20.
Dr Kunal Sarkar, senior heart specialist and vice-chairman at Medica Superspeciality Hospital, mentioned: “The ECMO is hard work. It’s a new, challenging technology. At the moment, it is definitely a bit punishing on the budget but has given us some ray of hope in helping people who otherwise wouldn’t even have had a 48-hours life expectancy.”
Dr Sarkar mentioned the West Bengal authorities has three ECMO machines which must be pressed into service on the earliest.
West Bengal coronavirus circumstances crossed the one-lakh mark on Tuesday whereas the demise depend rose to 2,149. The complete quantity of people that recovered from COVID-19 within the state was 73,395 on Tuesday, in accordance with the state well being division.
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