Dr. Guo Shuzhong, left, displays a photo of face transplant patient Li Guoxing at the Xijing Hosp...
BEIJING Apr 26, 2006 (AP)- The Chinese surgeon who led a partial face transplant on a farmer said Wednesday his patient might still need one or two more surgeries before his new face will be complete.
Doctors at the Xijing Hospital in central China had been practicing face transplant surgery on rabbits when they learned of a potential human candidate in February. By chance, Chinese environmentalists working in the remote mountains near Myanmar had discovered a farmer whose face was so disfigured by a bear attack that villagers shunned him.
The hospital, run by the People's Liberation Army, said it was only the second time that the complex procedure had been attempted in the world.
Li "is chewing food by himself and taking three meals per day," Dr. Guo Shuzhong, director of the hospital's plastic surgery department, said in some of his first comments to the foreign press since the 15-hour surgery. "He is pretty optimistic about the operation's result."
The poor farmer's journey from the remote mountains of Yunnan province to the operating table of an elite military hospital began in 2003 when he tried to use a stick to chase away a black bear attacking his cows and was himself brutally mauled, environmental activist Zhou Dequn said. The bear clawed at Li's face, tearing away much of his upper lip, nose and cheek.
Zhou is a Chinese representative for The Nature Conservancy, a U.S. environmental group, working on a program to ease farmer anger over the growing numbers of black bears in Yunnan since laws were enacted to protect them in the late 1990s. The bears kill and eat valuable livestock and destroy crops, farmers say.
"We hoped that we could help the wildlife in Yunnan but we realized it's also important to help the people there," Zhou told The Associated Press by telephone from Yunnan's capital, Kunming.
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