By Elizabeth Ladzinski
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
MANHATTAN — An unnamed New York City hospital was the location of a kidney transplant that caused the recipient to contract HIV, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
The hospital followed all correct protocols. The donor had "unsafe sex" after the test for HIV was administered, but before donating the organ, according to the Wall Street Journal which first reported the story on Tuesday.
This is the first documented case of HIV transmission via a transplant from a living donor, according to the CDC.
The 2009 incident has since caused the CDC to recommend that transplant centers worldwide screen living donors for HIV within seven days of the planned transplant, according to a CDC report.
Matthew Kuehnert, director of the CDC's office of blood, Organ and Other Tissue Saftey, told the Wall Street Journal that other cases could be "happening more frequently than we recognize and we are likely missing cases."
Kuehnert told the Journal that the risk of contracting HIV from a deceased donor is one in 20,000, but that there is no data on the risk from living donors.
There are two tests used to screen for HIV. One, called serology, can only detect antibodies to the virus in the blood after three to eight weeks from the infection, rendering it useless if infection occurs within a week of an organ transplant, according to the CDC report.
The second, nucleic acid testing, or NAT, can detect an HIV infection within eight to ten days. The CDC is asking that both methods be used as close to the time of organ recovery as possible.
According to the CDC report, the New York City hospital tested the donor 79 days before transplant, finding no evidence of infection. The male donor had been diagnosed and treated for syphilis prior to the transplant, and one year after the transplant took place, tested positive for HIV.
