There are new questions about the safety -- and risks -- of organ donation. As CBS 2 Medical Editor Mary Ann Childers reports, this comes after four patients at three Chicago hospitals got HIV – which causes AIDS – after receiving infected donor organs.
This is the first known instance of HIV transmission from an infected donor in the U.S. in more than 20 years. It happened despite proper procedures for testing donors and organs that experts say were followed to the letter by the Elmhurst-based Gift of Hope Organ & Tissue Donor Network, which serves Illinois and northwest Indiana.
Gift of Hope says the organs tested negative for HIV and hepatitis C because it takes 22 days from the time a person is infected until their immune system forms antibodies blood tests can detect. The donor was tested to rule out the presence of any transmissible disease. Tests for HIV, hepatitis and other conditions came back negative, possibly because the donor had acquired the infections in the last three weeks before death, or because the tests might not have picked up the diseases.
Pictured: Electron microscope photograph of the deadly Human Immunodeficiency Virus
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