Teenage girl facing death after organ blunder at top US clinic

A teenage girl could die within days because doctors at one of America's most celebrated hospitals mistakenly gave her a heart-lung transplant from a donor with a different blood type. Three days later Jesica Santillan suffered a heart attack when her body rejected the new organs.

Jesica, 17, is unconscious and being kept alive by a machine while her family makes a desperate effort to find a new donor. Doctors say she probably has days to live unless a donor can be found.

Her mother, Magdalena Santillan, who smuggled Jesica into the United States from Mexico three years ago for treatment, said: "Please help me find the organs my daughter needs to live. I said I was putting my daughter in God's hands, but the doctors made a big mistake."

The girl, who has restrictive cardiomyopathy, which left her with an enlarged, weakened heart and lungs, had the transplant at Duke University Hospital, in Durham, North Carolina, which started its organ donor programme in 1965. Mrs Santillan took Jesica to North Carolina because they have relatives there.

The transplant was arranged with two organ- procurement groups. The New England Organ Bank, which obtained the type A organs from an unidentified donor, informed its sister organisation, the Carolina Donor Services, that the heart and lungs might suit two potential recipients in North Carolina, and they identified them from a national database.

The CDS told Duke it had the set of type A organs. Two surgeons at the hospital turned them down, but a third, unidentified doctor requested them for Jesica, though she is blood type O positive. On 7 February, surgeons from Duke flew to Boston where they extracted the heart and lungs from the unidentified donor. Their return was delayed for several hours by a snowstorm. When they returned that evening they transplanted the organs.

Mack Mahoney, a North Carolina businessman who created a foundation to help to pay for Jesica's aftercare, said doctors told the family the operation went smoothly until routine tests at the end of the procedure revealed the organs did not match the teenager's blood type. By then Jesica's body was already starting to reject them. She suffered the heart attack three days later.

Mr Mahoney said he believed the delay in the doctors' return from Boston may have added to their haste and their failure to discover the blood type mismatch. "They were operating within a narrow window and that window was closing," he said.

The hospital, which bore the cost of the $1m-plus operation, has admitted its role and opened an inquiry. It has also issued guidelines in an effort to avoid a repeat, though it is unclear why the doctor requested organs from a type A donor for a type O positive patient, knowing such organs would almost certainly be rejected. Richard Puff, a hospital spokesman said: "This was a tragic event. We've done thousands of organ transplants and it's never happened before."

The donor organisations say the mistake was the fault of the hospital. A spokesperson for the New England group said: "The correct donor type was provided at the time of the organ recovery to the surgical team from Duke Hospital that came to New England to perform the recovery surgery."

Nita Mahoney, Mack's husband and a trustee of the Jesica's Hope Chest foundation, urged potential donors to come forward. They realise the chances are slim; only 27 such operations were done in the United States in 2001, the last year for which figures are available.

"I just ask someone who has a child who is on life support, and they are thinking of turning off the machine, not to let those organs go to waste; they are the gift of life," Mrs Mahoney said. "Jesica is breaking all the records. She has lived for 12 days with rejected organs. Her spirit is soaring like an eagle. She is fighting so hard to stay with us."