Bengal's first skin bank set to come up at SSKM

KOLKATA: Here's good news on the health front. Bengal's first skin bank is all set to come up at SSKM Hospital after a wait of almost eight years. The bank will help victims with severe burns, skin injuries and those requiring plastic surgery.

City-based plastic surgeons have hailed the move. "The proposal for such a skin bank was first forwarded in 2004 to the then health minister Surjya Kanta Mishra. Bengal was lacking such a facility for decades whereas Maharashtra had four such facilities. We were initially disheartened as we couldn't convince Mishra about the requirement,'' said Bijay Majumdar, head of the plastic surgery department, SSKM Hospital.

According to plastic surgeons, a skin bank is a facility where the skin donated by a person can be preserved for a few hours after his death and can be utilized by those requiring skin grafting.

The skin is harvested or collected from various parts of a body with a specific machine called 'electro dermatome'. To harvest the skin, a written consent has to be obtained from family members of the deceased person - much like the cornea donation.

Usually, in absence of a skin bank, skin grafting is done by harvesting the skin from the same person who is being operated upon or a relative of the patient. "On many occasions, I have felt that a skin bank could have helped us a lot as many patients succumbed to death due to infection and septisemia,'' said Prasanta Bhattacharya, a city-based plastic surgeon of Ramakrishna Mission Seva Pratisthan.

"Skin grafting is necessary for persons with 70% burns . You don't require antigen matching but other serological tests like HIV 1,HIV 2 and hepatitits on donated skins have to be performed before preserving the harvested skin,'' added Bhattacharya.

The SSKM Hospital authorities said that process had already been initiated to purchase the required equipment and sensitize all departments about the facility.