WASHINGTON Washington: People living with HIV who need kidney or liver transplants will be able to receive an organ from a donor with HIV under a new rule announced by US health officials on Tuesday. Previously, such transplants had only been done as part of research studies. Could have been done in the form. The new rule, which comes into effect from Wednesday, is expected to reduce the wait for organs for everyone regardless of HIV status by increasing the pool of available organs.
“This rule removes unnecessary barriers to kidney and liver transplants, expands the organ donor pool and improves outcomes for transplant recipients with human immunodeficiency virus,” U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said in a statement. said. The safety of this practice is supported by research, including a study published last month in the New England Journal of Medicine. That study followed 198 organ recipients for four years, comparing those who received kidneys from HIV-positive donors with those whose kidneys came from donors without HIV. Both groups had higher overall survival rates and lower rates of organ rejection.
In 2010, surgeons in South Africa provided the first evidence that the use of HIV-positive donor organs is safe in people with HIV. But this practice was not allowed in the United States until 2013 when the government lifted the ban and allowed research studies. At first, the studies were with deceased donors. Then in 2019, a team at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore performed the world's first kidney transplant from a living donor living with HIV to an HIV-positive recipient. In total, 500 kidney and liver transplants from HIV-positive donors have been performed in the US.
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