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How ECMO is redefining death
A medical technology can keep people alive when they otherwise would have died. Where will it lead?
He was wary of intubation—he’d heard that many patients didn’t survive for long after they’d been put on ventilators—and a nurse told him about ECMO, which would let his lungs heal by sparing them the work of breathing while inflamed by a viral infection. It’s also expensive; according to a 2023 study, the median hospitalization charge for COVID patients on ECMO was around eight hundred and seventy thousand dollars, and prolonged cases can exceed several million. Down the hall from the conference room where I spoke to Bartlett, a research intern named Gabriele Seilo sat at a lab bench, winding grooved pucks with a gauzy plastic fabric.
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