Organ donor breakthrough will help save HIV patients
Print Edition
Surgeons in Baltimore have performed what’s thought to be the world’s first kidney transplant from a living donor with HIV, a milestone for patients with the virus that can cause AIDS who need a new organ. If other donors with HIV come forward, it could free up space on the transplant waiting list.
Nina Martinez of Atlanta traveled to Johns Hopkins University to donate a kidney to an HIV-positive stranger, saying she “wanted to make a difference in somebody else’s life” and counter the stigma that too often still surrounds HIV.
Many people think “somebody with HIV is supposed to look sick,” Martinez, 35, said before Monday’s operation.
“It’s a powerful statement to show somebody like myself who’s healthy enough to be a living organ donor.”
Hopkins, which was due to make the transplant public yesterday, said both Martinez and the recipient of her kidney, who chose to remain anonymous, are recovering well.
“Here’s a disease that in the past was a death sentence and now has been so well controlled that it offers people with that disease an opportunity to save somebody else,” said Dr Dorry Segev, a Hopkins surgeon who pushed for the HIV Organ Policy Equity, or HOPE, Act that lifted a 25-year US ban on transplants among people with HIV.
There’s no count of how many HIV-positive patients are among the 113,000 people on the nation’s waiting list for an organ transplant. Only in the last few years have doctors begun transplanting organs from deceased donors with HIV into patients who also have the virus, organs that once would have been thrown away.
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