White Island tragedy: Human skin coming from Ohio to help burn victims

Packed in cardboard boxes and lined with foam and dry ice 15 donors-worth of skin is en route to New Zealand from Ohio - nearly 14,000 kms away.

The shipment is part of the 120 sq m of skin, 60 donors worth, needed to help treat White Island eruption victims' terrible burn injuries.

Following Monday's eruption, urgent calls were made to skin banks around the world and one of the largest suppliers of human skin, the Community Tissue Services in Kettering, responded immediately.

"It takes a huge amount of skin when you have an international catastrophe and this is one for sure," Diane Wilson, chief operating officer at Community Tissue Services, told the Washington Post.

"We are very, very fortunate that we keep the amount of skin on hand that we do," Wilson said.

Skin is the largest organ in the human body. It protects humans from infections and helps maintain the body's moisture, which is crucial to survival.

As surgeons continue to work around the clock, 28 people remain in hospital.

Of that, 15 patients are being cared for at four hospitals across New Zealand - 11 are critical.

Eight are being treated at Middlemore, three at Waikato, two at Hutt Valley and two at Christchurch.

Another 13 patients have been carefully transferred to Australia.

Twenty-year-old Adrian Hutching's skin is also being donated and could be a matter of life or death for some of the victims.

Adrian Hutchings who died in a car accident in September. Photo / Supplied

On September 13, Hutching's car went into a bridge on Whirinaki Valley Rd in Ngakuru, south of Rotorua. He suffered a critical head injury.

Hutchings was taken to Waikato Hospital and after three gruelling days in the Intensive Care Unit, his family was faced with a decision on whether to donate his organs or not.

"We all just said 'yes' straight away, no questions asked. That is what he would have wanted," Hutchings' mother Emma Aitchison said.

A skin donation - which can be stored in a freezer for up to five years - is used as dressing to help patients stay infection free and improve their outcomes until they are well enough to have skin grafts taken from their own body, chief medical officer at New Zealand Blood Service, Sarah Morley, told the Herald.

She said New Zealand sourced skin donations from the US regularly but in the last few days had required additional support due to those injured in the eruption.

"We believe that we have identified enough skin to look after the patients as far as the surgeons can predict for the next few weeks for those urgent requirements.

"Certainly the surgeons might come back to us for more depending on how the patients are doing and we will continue to maintain our stock to as high a number as we can," Morley said.

The skin - which is kept in storage of -70 degrees - is being transported to New Zealand in special frozen storage.

The skin from Australia will arrive within 12 to 24 hours and from the US between 24 to 36 hours from the time of order.