George Washington said: “Truth will ultimately prevail where pains is taken to bring it to light.” The media must ensure that their reporting is always true. With the start of the Israel-Gaza war, we saw Israeli propaganda laced with falsehoods, peddled by mainstream Western media.
Most shocking was the retraction of the statement by US President Joe Biden of the 40 babies beheaded by Hamas.
Closer to home, I was surprised to see an article in the Cape Argus on February 22, last year claiming that the kidney transplant – which did not require compatibility between the donor and recipient – was the first of its kind in South Africa, and in Africa.
This was confusing since I remember reading about a similar pioneering medical procedure six years earlier in the Weekend Argus on August 20, 2017. The donor was my children’s GP. I remember that she donated one of her kidneys to the daughter of a woman – an administrator – in the surgery where she worked. Apparently, the donor was keen to donate a kidney to the woman after seeing how she was suffering due to her failing kidneys. Unfortunately, the two were not medically compatible.
Years later, the woman’s daughter, Chantal Davids, encountered similar kidney problems, but this time compatibility was not an issue with the advent of a ground-breaking transplant procedure where donor and recipient did not have to be compatible.
So, this time the donor took the opportunity without hesitation to donate a kidney to her dead colleague’s daughter. The actions of the donor speak volumes of her humanity and character.
Note, both articles claim that the surgery involved ABO incompatibility (ABOi). The two articles referred to operations that differed from the usual kidney transplant as they do not require compatible blood types from the donor and the recipient.
Herein lies the problem: both operations carried out six years apart cannot both be the first to be carried out in South Africa and in Africa. Since the date of the operation is of decisive importance, common sense dictates that the operation performed first is the one that should be recorded in our history as the pioneering operation for the ABOi procedure.
Your newspaper’s alleged misreporting of the second ABO-i operation as the first in Africa not only robs the first recipient of the ABOi procedure, Chantal Davids, of the recognition and glory she deserves, but it also robs Professor Elmi Muller of her rightful place in history as the first person to have successfully performed the first ABOi kidney transplant in South Africa and on the African continent.
This is akin to awarding the honour of the first successful human-to-human heart transplant recipient not to Louis Washkansky, but to the second recipient of such an operation and also denying Professor Christiaan Barnard the honour of being the pioneer of the first human-to-human heart transplant in the world.
I trust the Cape Argus newspaper will investigate the discrepancy highlighted above and ensure that a correction to the story is published.
* Adiel Ismail, Mountview.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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