Nov 16, 2007 10:38 pm US/Central
HIV-Infected Organ Recipients May Have Been Misled
4 Patients Who Contracted HIV, Hepatitis From Organs May Not Have Been Told Of Donor's High-Risk Status
CHICAGO (CBS) ―
There are new questions about what recipients were told about the HIV-infected organs used in transplants at three Chicago hospitals. CBS 2 Chief Correspondent Jay Levine reports that one woman claims she was completely misled about her new kidney's donor.
One of the four organ transplant patients infected with HIV is a single Chicago-area woman in her 30s who had rejected an organ from another potential donor "because of his lifestyle," according to her attorney. The patient, identified in court documents as Jane Doe, received a kidney transplant at the University of Chicago Medical Center on Jan. 9.
Dr. Michael Millis, the chief of transplantation at the U of C, says tests on the donor's organs came back negative. A hospital spokesman says "we follow guidelines."
Those CDC guidelines include the following: "gay men who are sexually active should not be used as organ donors unless the patient is in imminent danger of death..."
Gift of Hope Organ & Tissue Donor Network in Elmhurst and the University of Chicago both knew the kidney donor was high-risk and did not inform the patient, said Thomas Demetrio, Jane Doe's attorney.
Demetrio says on January 8, the day before surgery, his client was told the kidney was from a "young, healthy, strong male." Not until last Tuesday, November 13, was she told the donor was also a "38-year-old gay man who lived a high-risk lifestyle."
"They were informed, but their patient wasn't," Demetrio said, attorney for one of the patients.
Demetrio filed a petition Thursday in Cook County Circuit Court on behalf of the woman, asking officials to keep a hospital and an organ procurement center from destroying or altering any records involving the donation.
"Years prior to this she made the conscious choice of not taking a particular donor's kidney, not because he was in the high-risk, but because of lifestyle," Demetrio said.
It is not yet known what three other patients -- one at the U of C, another at Northwestern Memorial and the third at Rush -- were told prior to their surgeries.
"The people that dedicate their lives to these transplant surgeries, they're just great people, but they need to bring the patient into the mix and let them make an informed decision," he said.
It is known, however, that the most sophisticated of the screening tests wasn't done.
"It's a very difficult test to run, it's a technically very demanding test and to have it available 24/7 is a logistical nightmare but its something we feel we need to investigate and have available in this region," Millis said.
U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines were violated twice, Demetrio said. One violation was not informing the woman about the donor's status and then not testing her afterward for HIV until just recently, after HIV and hepatitis were found during tests on another patient who was being evaluated for a second transplant.
Doctors and patients are sometimes willing to accept organs from high-risk donors if the risk of dying without one is greater than the risk of getting HIV or some other disease. But in this case, the patient filing the lawsuit was doing well on dialysis, there was no emergency, and according to her attorney, there was no way, had she known, that she would have taken the risk.
The four infected patients got organs in January from a donor who died after a traumatic injury. The donor had engaged in high-risk behaviors, according to a screening questionnaire, but standard testing showed he did not have AIDS or hepatitis C.
Gift of Hope tested the organs and approved them for donation, telling the three hospitals that they came from a high-risk donor.
Several months later, when one of the patients was being evaluated, blood tests showed the patient had HIV and hepatitis C. The other three patients were notified and tested, showing they had both viruses.
The CDC says it's the first time ever that both viruses were transmitted simultaneously through an organ transplant. It's also the first known time since 1986 that HIV was transmitted through organ donation.
CBS 2's Jay Levine and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
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