China: Cells from aborted foetuses are being used in a new treatment to help paralysed patients recover movement, reports Clifford Coonan in Beijing
In a clinic near Beijing's Fragrant Hills, Dr Huang Hongyun, a former military doctor from north-east China, is offering hope to people with paralysis, using a procedure his patients describe as miraculous.
Dr Huang is no charlatan, for he makes no promises and admits he cannot explain how the procedure works.
In ways no one understands, including the Chinese neurosurgeon, the transplanted cells help paralysed patients recover movement.
And many people who have been through the procedure say it works.
What Dr Huang does is inject the spinal cord with olfactory ensheathing glial cells from the nasal region of aborted foetuses.
Conventional medical wisdom has long maintained there is no cure for paralysis.
Dr Huang's discovery has led to a surge of hope in the community of spinal-cord injury victims - the internet chat rooms are buzzing with the news, alive with hope of a cure or at least some treatment.
"For the first time since the accident I felt cold on my legs at night. I had to ask my mom to bring me a blanket," says Parisa Eftekhar, a striking 22-year-old Iranian woman, who suffered spinal cord injury in a car crash.
She firmly believes the procedure is a miracle. It's allowed her to sweat a little - the inability to sweat is one of the problems that goes with spinal cord injuries that makes the lives of sufferers that bit more difficult, as it means they have to go inside on hot days to avoid overheating.
Dr Huang has operated on over 500 patients, both Chinese and foreign, and most of them experience some improvement in function - between 5 and 15 per cent, according to the Chinese Medical Journal.
He distances himself from any talk of a cure.
"In the future, who knows? Ten years, 100 years, 1,000 years, maybe then we will solve this problem. Progress will come step by step. If we can make someone with a chronic spinal-cord injury recover, then we've solved the whole problem of the central nervous system and can treat Parkinson's disease, strokes, brain damage. But in this field, any progress, even a little, is something great," said Dr Huang.
He simply refused to believe the conventional notion that chronic spinal injuries cannot be treated.
"I worked for 22 years as a neurosurgeon and whenever a patient asked me, will I get function back, I had to tell them no. I can't do anything more," he says.
"But I'm a doctor, I want to help. This is why I tried to find some method to help and that's why I feel lucky I found this procedure," he says.
He also refused to believe that it was impossible to stabilise people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, a progressive and ultimately fatal neuro-muscular disease that causes nerve cells to degenerate and muscles to weaken.
It is among the Lou Gehrig's disease sufferers that the results of Dr Huang's operation are most dramatic, with many of them clearly improved within hours of the operation.
ALS sufferer Andy Etherington (44) from Texas arrived in the clinic about three weeks ago and had the procedure done on December 2nd. "I can hold my head up easier, before I used to have to wear a neck brace to stop my head from falling forward on my chest. My voice is slightly stronger," he says.
"There is nothing left for us. I would say to the sceptics - come and see. There is no arguing with the end result," he says.
"This is not just another doctor looking for $20,000. This is pioneering and we are the pioneers. Historically we're part of this whole thing. There is a debate but frankly these people don't have time for all that discussion," says his wife, Lenore Etherington.
Dr Huang does not see any reason why the procedure could not be carried out in Ireland.
"I would be optimistic that within five years we could see this in Irish hospitals. Maybe even an improved version of the procedure could be used to help people in Ireland," he said.
There is a debate about the ethics of using cells from foetuses in the West, but in China, where the One Child Policy and the obsession with having boys rather than girls leads to 20 million abortions a year, there are few qualms.
Dr Huang was born in northeast China in 1955 and lived in Xinjiang until he moved to Beijing, where he worked at the military hospital. In 1997 he worked for three years doing post-doctoral research at Rutgers, the state university of New Jersey.
Clinical trials take years in the West, but not in China, and Dr Huang was inspired by the speed of the recovery of the patients.
There is now a waiting list until 2006 for the operation, which costs around $20,000.
Marcel Engels is from Opwijk, near Brussels and is 67. He was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease two years ago, having had the disease for six months. He is extremely thin and weak from the disease, but the procedure has been fantastic, his daughter Anne says.
"One week before he came here he couldn't eat. His left arm was totally paralysed. Two hours after the surgery he could make a fist and spread his fingers. He has more power in his left arm and he walks quicker with a walking stick," she says.
"I cannot express what this procedure means. It's very dramatic to see your father, who was always a very active person, begin to weaken so quickly. But now he is walking without a stick for the first time since June. It's unbelievable, there is power there," she says.