Doctors report groundbreaking HIV-to-HIV organ transplants.

"A couple of weeks ago, we performed the first HIV-to-HIV liver transplant in the world and the first HIV-to-HIV kidney transplant in the United States," Dr. Dorry Segev said during a midday media briefing.
Before 2013 and passage of the HIV Organ Policy Equity Act, this kind of medical advance would not have been possible, because it was illegal for HIV-positive patients to donate organs in the United States.
 
The act allows HIV-positive donors to donate organs to patients infected with the AIDS-causing virus, Segev said.Until the law was changed, thousands of patients with HIV in need of organ transplants often risked death while waiting for a donated organ, he said.At the same time, "we were throwing away organs from donors infected with HIV just because they were infected. 
 
These were potentially good organs," said Segev, a professor of surgery and director of the epidemiology research group in organ transplantation at the Baltimore-based medical school. Dr. Christine Durand, an assistant professor of medicine and oncology at Hopkins, said the transplant operations went well and both patients are doing "extremely well."
The patient who received the kidney has already gone home, and the liver transplant patient is expected to leave the hospital in a couple of weeks, she said. Both the liver and kidney came from a deceased HIV-infected donor, the doctors said. Now that HIV can be controlled with medications, there's no reason why donor organs from HIV-positive people can't be used for HIV-positive patients in need of transplants, Segev said

Share on Google Plus

About Unknown

This is a short description in the author block about the author. You edit it by entering text in the "Biographical Info" field in the user admin panel.