Child able to urinate after appendix replaces ureter (2)

Turin, March 14 - A two-year-old girl is able to urinate autonomously thanks to an operation staged for the first time at Turin's Molinette hospital in which her ureter was replaced with the appendix. The girl was born with just one kidney, the left one, and it had a rare congenital condition linked to the ureter - a tube of muscle fibre that propels urine from the kidneys to the bladder. Several operations to fix this problem at other Italian hospitals had failed. The surgery performed in Turin by Dr Emilio Merlini made it possible to pass urine from the kidney to the bladder using the appendix. As a result it has been possible to remove the tube that took urine out of the child's body and upon which her life had depended. The appendix had only been used for a partial substitution of the ureter in other previous cases, of which there were only two or three worldwide.