A South African man who received the world’s first successful penis transplant is set to become a father.
The announcement was made by Stellenbosch University urologist Professor Andre van der Merwe at a public lecture on Thursday.
BBC also reports that the man’s girlfriend reported that she is about four months’ pregnant, and this showed that the “transplant worked” .
The 21-year-old South African, lost all but one centimeter of his penis during a botched circumcision when he was 18.
He received the donated penis in December after a nine-hour operation, which was the first in the world to be successful.
The procedure was not publicly reported until March as doctors wanted to see how the patient recovered.
For the doctors who performed the surgery this news is exciting because it shows the success of their surgery.
The man whose identity has not been disclosed is still being monitored six months after the delicate nine-hour micro surgery done at the Tygerberg Hospital in December last year.
The procedure was part of a pilot study that began in 2010, and is a major breakthrough for this region of the world, where many men suffer through traditional circumcision practices that can cause disfigurement and loss of the organ or even death from infections.
Circumcisions are performed on boys and young men as a rite of passage to adulthood in some rural parts of South Africa.
Stellenbosch University said experts had estimated that there could be as many as 250 penis amputations a year in the country because of botched circumcisions.
One report last year estimated that since 2006, 500 young men had died from such rituals in Eastern Cape province alone.
There are no formal records on the number of penis amputations that occur each year as a result of circumcisions gone wrong, but some experts estimate that doctors in South Africa perform about 250 amputations annually.
The medical team says penis transplantation surgery could also become an option for patients with penile cancer and perhaps even as a last-resort treatment for men with severe erectile dysfunction.
