A newborn has successfully undergone an operation to remove a sacrococcygeal teratoma tumor at 23 weeks, 5 days into the mother's pregnancy. The mother gave birth to the baby during week 35:
A baby girl from Lewisville, Texas, has been "born" twice after she was taken out of her mother's womb for 20 minutes for life-saving surgery.
At 16 weeks pregnant, Margaret Hawkins Boemer discovered her daughter, Lynlee Hope, had a tumour on her spine.
The mass, known as a sacrococcygeal teratoma, was diverting blood from the foetus - raising the risk of fatal heart failure.
[...] Doctor Darrell Cass of Texas Children's Fetal Centre was one of the team who carried out the surgery. He said the tumour had been so large that a "huge" incision was required to reach it, leaving the baby "hanging out in the air".
Lynlee's heart virtually stopped during the procedure but a heart specialist kept her alive while most of the tumour was removed, he added. The team then placed her back in her mother's womb and sewed her uterus up.
This isn't the first surgery of its kind:
"Baby Boemer is still an infant but is doing beautiful," said Cass, remarking that she is perfectly healthy. His one previous surgery of this kind was also a success. "I think she's about 7 now, and she sings karaoke to Taylor swift[sic] -- she's completely normal," said Cass.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @09:02AM
A great step for medicine, a great shame for a society where tumors, formerly rare and restricted to old people, now affect people who still have to be born.
(Score: 1) by ewk on Wednesday October 26 2016, @09:45AM
back in the good'ole days babies/infants/children/etc. all got tumors, they just died from them.
Even 'worse'... This specific type of tumor (Sacrococcygeal teratoma (SCT) is more likely to develop in children.
So, old people don't have much to to with this type of tumor.
I don't always react, but when I do, I do it on SoylentNews
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @12:20PM
No, but now this girl might live to have cancer prone children of her own, who will be saved by surgery, who will then go on to have cancer prone children of their own...
(Score: 1) by ewk on Wednesday October 26 2016, @12:32PM
And like any adult with a known hereditary defect, she will be able to make an informed choice about children or not.
If we would only allow people without genetic defect to live and procreate...
I don't always react, but when I do, I do it on SoylentNews
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @12:59PM
> she will be able to make an informed choice
Will she be shown photos of the lump of malformed body parts that was pretending to be her tail for a few months when she's older? And if she is shown that, will she volunteer to not fling her legs in the air after her prom date? Reversible sterilisation at birth is the best solution, IMHO. Then the "informed choice" is to explicitly un-sterilise herself, so no oopses happen.
You're terribly terribly naive about humans young and old.
(Score: 1) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Wednesday October 26 2016, @01:10PM
Forced sterilization has a long, sad history.
I doubt any sterilization techniques effective at birth would be reversible.
(Score: 1) by ewk on Wednesday October 26 2016, @01:16PM
Sure... let's just preventative sterilize everyone after birth. Just to prevent any 'oopses'.
And you're calling me naive?? tsk, tsk....
I don't always react, but when I do, I do it on SoylentNews
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @01:13PM
1) Not all cancers are hereditary, and my guess is that this one isn't as well.
2) There is no such thing as "without genetic defects", even after selection "defects" might develop at later age (e.g. skin cancer due to UV exposure or lung cancer due to smoking). And good luck defining what would be considered a "genetic defect". A "genetic defect" (or closely related trait) could be beneficial to a subpopulation in the future. If you could remove those defects you might even put the whole human population on jeopardy. No "genetic defects" would mean reducing the fitness of a population.
(Score: 1) by ewk on Wednesday October 26 2016, @01:24PM
So... all the more reason to not interfere too much in life finding it's way...
Good to see that some ACs actually do think :-)
I don't always react, but when I do, I do it on SoylentNews
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday October 26 2016, @05:30PM
Be sure to tell your doctor about your opinion on not-treating treatable diseases. I assume you're a Christian Scientist 'cause there's no way you could be a massive hypocrite on the internet. That never happens.
(Score: 1) by ewk on Wednesday October 26 2016, @06:18PM
Once you assume you're making an 'ass' out of mostly 'u' and a bit of 'me'... :-)
Not burdened by any religion or religious upbringing, I am all in favour of treating what can be treated, hence the phrase 'too much' in my previous comment in this thread.
Next time please engage your brain before you start to type.
Thank you for your cooperation.
I don't always react, but when I do, I do it on SoylentNews
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @01:49PM
You are making the assumption that the cause is due to a dominant genetic allele.
(Score: 1) by nobu_the_bard on Wednesday October 26 2016, @07:20PM
Maybe if she was born with some nightmarish mutation that caused unending suffering for her and everyone she encountered, like spewing poison she herself is not immune to whenever she opens her mouth, I could understand not helping her. But where would we get politicians from if we made a habit of this? :)
(Score: 4, Touché) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday October 26 2016, @01:54PM
Perhaps too obvious, but does this automatically make her a Christian? Or does she need to be born again again?
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Wednesday October 26 2016, @02:29PM
Much as it is a miracle of modern medicine that this child survived, this is exactly why America has the most expensive health care system in the world. TFA doesn't say anything about the finances, but I'd guess that the procedure was covered past a deductible by insurance at a cost of at least 7 figures. The rest of us have to pay for that with higher premiums. Not only that, but I'd also guess that paying off that deductible (likely at least $4000) took a few years, and hospitals don't pay doctors with IOUs. The American taxpayer footed the bill, paying the heroic doctors who performed the procedure, and the four-figure debt probably paid hospital administrators instead.
I suppose there is no other system in the world that could provide this kind of extremely expensive care to the average person. But I'm not happy that procedures like this are responsible for my premiums going up. Miscarriages have been a fact of life for the entire history of human existence. Was it really worth it to prevent this one?
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @02:44PM
if it wasn't worth it, it wouldn't have happened.
and you're an asshole.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Wednesday October 26 2016, @10:17PM
It's hard to tell if it's worth it when the family is facing a fixed deductible and the health insurance company is facing contractual obligations based on doctor's recommendations with nobody even able to find out what the total costs really were.
And yes, I am being an asshole. It's the internet and somebody had to say it. As a matter of personal conviction...I'm not as concerned as I seem. Mainly I want to see somebody (like AthanasiusKircher below) refute me.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday October 26 2016, @04:26PM
Much as it is a miracle of modern medicine that this child survived, this is exactly why America has the most expensive health care system in the world. TFA doesn't say anything about the finances, but I'd guess that the procedure was covered past a deductible by insurance at a cost of at least 7 figures. The rest of us have to pay for that with higher premiums.
If you're really going to "follow the money" in a situation like this, you should at least dig a bit deeper and ask why the cost is so high for procedures in the first place. Obviously with a new or experimental procedure, there will be all sorts of extra costs, but most routine medical care and procedures have huge cost inflation too.
But I'm not happy that procedures like this are responsible for my premiums going up.
Is this really the reason you have a high premium? A one-in-ten-million procedure that costs a bundle? What about the routine procedures and services hospitals perform every day that "cost" tens of thousands of dollars? Throw together just a few of the top surgical procedures -- say, spinal fusion surgery, angioplasty, and knee replacements -- and you're already talking about over $35 billion annually. If you could shave even a dollar or two off each of these procedures (which all cost more than $10,000 on average), you could easily pay for a some very unusual case that costs a few million.
Could it be that health care premiums are so ridiculously high because EVERYBODY in the system is skimming a bit off the top? Why is health insurance so high? Well, you start by saying that doctors and hospitals charge a lot. Why do they charge a lot? Well, aside from obvious salaries and such, equipment is expensive. Malpractice insurance is expensive. Why are these expensive? Because medical equipment companies, pharmaceutical companies, etc. charge huge premiums even for standard medical equipment and drugs that have been around for decades. And liitigation crazy lawyers are ready to sue at a moment's notice (and skim quite a bit off the top for themselves, too).
And underlying a lot of all these problems is the very concept of "insurance" itself. Not only do insurance companies also skim a bunch off the top (and cause all sorts of indirect costs by requiring medical coding experts and other folks in doctor's offices to argue with the insurance companies over whether to approve a claim), they also make costs indirect and less transparent at many stages of the process, causing them to be just accepted rather than seen and discussed directly by the people who are paying for them or even charging them.
Once you start thinking about it, there's an incredible amount of inefficiency in the healthcare system, leading to high costs that are mostly propped up by insurance administration (and other unnecessary middlemen) and the fact that many people at many stages of this feel they "can charge just a bit more" because they know they're often providing lifesaving care -- or at least care that can have significant impacts on people's lives.
Remove all of this stuff, and the cost of many routine procedures potentially could be lowered by an order of magnitude. But it's probably impossible to get rid of all the unnecessary crap. Still -- tweak any part of the system, and you can probably shave off 10% somewhere. I could even go into a few more specific changes that could even make a huge difference while likely increasing quality of care, but I don't want to get bogged down in specific policy debates.
So, yeah... I'm all for removing inefficiency in the American healthcare system. And maybe at some point we'll have to start making "hard choices" about whether to provide expensive procedures to the average Joe. But first, maybe we should focus on shaving off the huge amounts of waste that are the BULK of the costs in your insurance premium.
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Wednesday October 26 2016, @09:03PM
"Baby Boemer is still an infant but is doing beautiful,"
Baby Boemer is a Post-Millenial?
(Score: 2) by KiloByte on Thursday October 27 2016, @03:36AM
I now realize that laws which our theocratic national socialist govt wants to pass are not utterly without merit. They want to ban "murdering a child in utero" which on the first glance is impossible because the legal definition of "child" is "a member of the species Homo Sapiens between birth and 18 years of age". Yet, with this technology that allows putting a child back in, this actually makes sense!
Ceterum censeo systemd esse delendam.