The first lung transplant in Romania was made on Wednesday, April 18, at the Sfanta Maria Hospital in Bucharest. Although a very important medical success, the intervention was overshadowed by the recent quarrel between Bucharest mayor Gabriela Firea and former health minister Vlad Voiculescu over the possibility of carrying out such a procedure in Romania.

The scandal started from a Facebook post of Vlad Voiculescu, who was the health minister in the 2016 technocrat government led by Dacian Ciolos, in which he talked about an eight-year-old girl with cystic fibrosis the doctors can’t save anymore. He said things got to this point because the girl “was born and lives in the wrong place,” and said Gabriela Firea should be ashamed of this situation.

The former minister also said that Firea “coordinated the attack in 2016 against those who showed the truth and against AKH Vienna.” “This attack and the AKH Vienna's refusal to receive Romanian patients without any limitation cost dozens of Romanians their lives,” reads the Facebook post from April 17.

In her turn, Firea said that, first of all, there has to be a donated organ for a transplant to be made. She also accused Voiculescu of promoting false information and of carrying out “an electoral campaign at the expense of people’s health,” and said that she would sue him.

Voiculescu’s response came on Facebook, through a post in which he asked why no transplant was made at the Sfanta Maria Hospital although the center has been accredited for one year and a half. He also said he would want to meet Gabriela Firea in court.

The scandal around the transplant center at Sfanta Maria Hospital began in 2016, the year when the center was accredited. Voiculescu, who was the health minister at that time, said then that there were suspicions that the Sfanta Maria lung transplant center had been accredited on political pressure. He also asked for an investigation at the center.

As a response, Gabriela Firea asked Voiculescu to “unblock” the lung transplant procedures at the Sfanta Maria Hospital, as people were dying because he stopped the center’s activity. She also said at that time that lungs had been taken to the Vienna instead of being used in Romania.

In March 2017, former health minister Florian Bodog said the lung transplant center at the Sfanta Maria hospital in Bucharest would not open until the ministry is sure that it can safely perform lung transplant procedures. Then, a few days later, he announced that Romanian patients could no longer undergo lung transplants at the AKH hospital in Vienna as the institution “unilaterally annulled” the contract based on which these surgeries were performed. Most Romanians in need of a lung transplant were undergoing this surgery at the Vienna hospital as the procedure couldn’t be performed in Romania.

The first lung transplant at the center in Bucharest, which is also the first lung transplant in Romania, was made on Wednesday, April 18, 2018, one day after the Bucharest mayor said that no transplant had been carried out there because of the lack of donated organs. The patient who received the organ is a 37 year-old-man from Iasi, a city in Eastern Romania, and the doctors said the surgery was a success.

“It seems that, overnight, lungs harvested from a donor arrived at the Sfanta Maria hospital,” Vlad Voiculescu said after the news about the transplant broke out in the media.

Irina Marica, irina.marica@romania-insider.com