Prominent Palestinian leader Saeb Erekat, who is seriously ill after having been infected with the coronavirus, has been connected to a heart-lung machine, the Israeli hospital treating him says.
The Hadassah Medical Centre in Jerusalem said the 65-year-old was connected to an ECMO (Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation) machine to support his lung function.
The machine oxygenates the blood, allowing the lungs to rest and avoid ventilator-associated lung injury, bearing in mind that Erekat had a lung transplant in 2017.
The hospital said Erekat was “well-settled and stable.”
“His care continues to be co-ordinated with lung transplant specialists in Israel and abroad to provide optimum care to this patient with complications of Covid-19 infection on the background of a previous lung transplant,” the statement added.
Doctors said Erekat’s treatment posed “an enormous challenge” as a lung-transplant patient with a suppressed immune system, which had caused a bacterial infection in addition to the virus.illcoronillcoron
Read the article in The Canberra Times (AAP).