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Patients contract HIV from organs

The donor tested negative, possibly because infection was recent.

By Times Wires
Published November 14, 2007

Four transplant recipients in Chicago have contracted HIV and hepatitis from an organ donor, the first known cases of the virus being spread by organ transplants in 22 years.

It's also the first known instance in which one organ donor has spread hepatitis C and HIV at the same time, said Dr. Matt Kuehnert of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The organ donor tested negative for both diseases, health officials said, apparently because the donor was infected too recently for commonly used blood tests to detect the infection.

The Chicago hospitals were told that the donor was high-risk, but none would say what information was relayed to the patients or their families.

The CDC and other public health officials are investigating. They emphasized that the risk of disease from transplanted organs is less than 0.01 percent. Noting that more than 400,000 transplants have occurred nationwide in the past two decades, they called the transplant system safe.

Still, the Chicago case shows that to make an informed decision, patients "have a right to more information" than doctors often give, said University of Pennsylvania medical ethicist Art Caplan.

Officials declined Tuesday to identify the Chicago patients, the donor or what organs were transplanted.

The four patients got their organs in January at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Rush University Medical Center and the University of Chicago Medical Center. Two had their operation at the University of Chicago hospital.

Blood tests commonly used to test for infection do not find the virus itself; they look instead for the body's reaction to the infection - antibodies produced by the immune system.

But the body takes time to react, and if the test is done too soon - within 22 days of infection - the antibodies may not be detected. Doctors say that is what probably occurred in these cases.

[Last modified November 14, 2007, 01:38:57]