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Plastic surgeons at St John’s Hospital in Bengaluru have sought skin for grafting for the 24-year-old acid attack victim, from the skin bank at Victoria Hospital. It is the first such bank in Karnataka and the second largest in the country.
While skin donation is not too well known, families of as many as 139 deceased people have donated skin of their kin to the skin bank, ever since it began six years ago. Yet, while the tertiary care burns unit at Victoria Hospital alone gets an average of five to six patients with second and third-degree burns per day, the gap between demand and donation is huge, as they use skin from their bank for their own patients, and there are also many requests from other hospitals.
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