Four Chicago transplant recipients contract HIV

Four Chicago transplant recipients contract HIV
CHICAGO (Reuters) - Four transplant recipients at threeChicago hospitals have contracted HIV and hepatitis C from asingle organ donor, U.S. health officials said on Tuesday.
The cases mark the first incidence of HIV infectioncontracted from organ donation in more than 20 years, accordingto Dr. Matthew Kuehnert, who oversees organ safety at the U.S.Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Kuehnert said outside testing has confirmed that both thedonor and all four transplant recipients have tested positivefor both HIV and hepatitis C.
"It is very unlikely that all four would be infected withHIV and hepatitis C by chance," Kuehnert said in a telephoneinterview.
He said the CDC is conducting its own tests to match thestrain of HIV in the donor with the infected recipients and todetermine the best course of treatment.
Hospital officials confirmed that two patients at theUniversity of Chicago Medical Center, one patient atNorthwestern Memorial Hospital and one at Rush UniversityMedical Center tested positive for HIV or humanimmunodeficiency virus, which causes AIDS.
"All of the policies were followed correctly and all of thetests were done correctly. Unfortunately, the tests came backas a false negative result," said Mandy Claggett, a spokeswomanfor United Network for Organ Sharing or UNOS, which sets policyfor organ donation and has been monitoring the investigation.
'ALWAYS RISK'
Kuehnert said the organs came from a high-risk donor,meaning from someone who fit under one of several criteria thatwould increase the chances that the person might have beinfected with HIV.
Those include men who have had sex with another man in thepreceding five years, intravenous drug users, prisoners, andpeople who have had sex for money or drugs.
Dave Bosch of the Gift of Hope Organ and Tissue Donation,the regional organ procurement agency that handled the donororgans, said the donor's high-risk status was confirmed on aquestionnaire. "We were aware of that from the beginning," hesaid.
But standard testing using the enzyme-linked immunosorbentassay or ELISA antibody screening test was negative.
When Gift of Hope was notified of the infections, it sentsamples from the donor to an outside lab, Bosch said. A secondELISA test turned up negative, but a more sensitive test calledthe nucleic acid-amplification test or NAT was positive.
Bosch said it is possible the HIV infection in the donoroccurred within three weeks of donation -- too recent for theELISA test to detect.
He said Gift of Hope and others involved in organ donationare weighing which test might be best against the need for theneed for rapid testing.
He said about 9 percent of the 22,000 organ transplants inthe United States involve high-risk organs.
The CDC's Kuehnert said the problem is part of the riskthat goes with organ transplantation.
"You can't disinfect an organ. You can't process it. Thereis always going to be some risk," Kuehnert said."One thing people should take from this is that the reasonthere are high-risk donors being accepted is because of a lackof available organs," he said."For someone on the organ transplant list, they should talkto their physician about the risk," he said.(Editing by Eric Walsh)