A 27-year-old man suffering from a disfiguring inherited disease has undergone a partial face transplant, the second to be conducted in France and only the third in the world, surgeons said on Tuesday.
"The patient is doing well," said the lead surgeon, Laurent Lantieri, of the Henri Mondor University Hospital Clinic in Creteil, in the Paris suburbs.
The patient was a sufferer of neurofibromatosis, in which the face is disfigured by grotesque lesions.
According to the daily 'Le Parisien,' the 15-hour operation entailed transplanting the nose, mouth and chin and part of his cheeks.
The world's first partial face transplant was conducted in Amiens, France, in November 2005, on a 38-year-old Frenchwoman, Isabelle Dinoire, who had been badly bitten by her dog.
In April 2006, Le Guoxing, a 30-year-old Chinese farmworker who had been attacked by a bear, was given a partial face transplant at the Xijing Hospital in Xian, China.