Posted on 07/29/21
| News Source: i24
Kidney exchange part of wider organ donor program established after Abraham Accords
Israel and the United Arab Emirates this week participated in a three-way kidney swap in the first such medical exchange with an Arab state.
Israeli Shani Markowitz, 39, underwent surgery on Wednesday at Tel Hashomer-Sheba Medical Center in Ramat Gan to remove her kidney. The organ was then flown to Abu Dhabi to be donated to the mother of a woman there who had her kidney removed and flown to Israel for a woman at Rambam Medical Center in Haifa.
The husband of the Rambam patient was set to give a kidney to Markowitz’s mother, via surgery at Rabin Medical Center in Petah Tikva.
“This is very exciting. It’s the first time we have conducted such a process between Israel and an Arab state, and it really shows that medicine has no borders,” Dr. Rafi Bayer, chairman of the Israel Center for Organ Transplantation, told The Times of Israel.
The kidney exchange is part of a wider organ donor program that was established following the signing of the Abraham Accords in September 2020 at the White House that normalized relations between Israel and the UAE and Bahrain. Morocco and Sudan later joined the historic pact.
Abu Dhabi’s regulator of healthcare and Sheba earlier this month signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with a focus on research, particularly telemedicine and medical AI applications.