内容摘要：. In one of Latin America’s biggest Mennonite communities, she knows many will decline to be vaccinated or even open their doors. But some will ask questions, and a handful might even agree to get shots on the spot.

. In one of Latin America’s biggest Mennonite communities, she knows many will decline to be vaccinated or even open their doors. But some will ask questions, and a handful might even agree to get shots on the spot.

“We have to have the courage to continue,” said University of Maryland transplant surgeon Dr.Back in 2022, Griffith had a hard time figuring out how to ask a dying patient if he’d consider undergoing the world’s first transplant of a gene-edited pig heart.

“I was so afraid to mention the word pig heart,” Griffith said. He marveled that patient David Bennett responded with a joke about oinking and made clear if thefailed that “maybe you’ll learn something for others like me.”Fast forward to late 2023, when patients at a National Kidney Foundation meeting with FDA officials and pig developers described a life so miserable on dialysis that they, too, would chance an animal organ.

“Why not try? That was really what we took back,” said Mike Curtis, CEO of eGenesis, one of the companies developing organs. “It was like we really almost have an obligation to try.”“The patients pushed us to go ahead,” agreed Dr. Tatsuo Kawai, a Mass General surgeon who’d been reluctant to even broach the idea – but last March, four months after that meeting, gave a longtime patient the first gene-edited pig kidney.

In Palm Springs, California, Carl McNew emailed NYU to ask about volunteering while he’s still fairly healthy.

McNew donated a kidney to his husband in 2015 but later his remaining kidney began declining, something very rare in living donors. Medications and intermittent dialysis are helping but McNew knows he’ll eventually need a transplant.The surgeon general, considered the nation’s doctor, oversees 6,000 U.S. Public Health Service Corps members and can issue advisories that warn of public health threats.

In March, the White House pulled from consideration the nomination of former Florida GOP Rep.to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. His skepticism on vaccines had

, and he withdrew after being told by the White House that he did not have enough support to be confirmed.The withdrawal was first reported by Bloomberg News.