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One of the Michigan woman’s surgeons also came down with COVID-19 after the procedure, but later recovered.
The following written content by Claire Gillespie
COVID-19 has made life tough for everybody who needed health care over the last year, but especially challenging for transplant patients. The pandemic has disrupted the referral and listing process, led to the postponement and cancellation of many transplant procedures, and made it more challenging for transplant patients to get the pre- and post-transplant care they require.
For one woman with chronic obstructive lung disease, finally getting her transplant wasn’t the happy end to her transplant story. In a recent case study, published in the American Journal of Transplantation, doctors say a Michigan woman became infected with COVID-19 after receiving a tainted double-lung transplant from a donor who turned out to carry SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, despite showing no symptoms and initially testing negative. The unnamed woman died last fall, two months after her transplant at University Hospital in Ann Arbor.
Officials at the University of Michigan Medical School believe it may be the first proven case of COVID-19 in the US in which the virus was transmitted via an organ transplant (and it’s the only confirmed case out of almost 40,000 transplants in 2020).
The officials are calling for more exhaustive testing of lung transplant donors, including the testing of samples from deep within the donor lungs as well as the nose and throat. They also suggest “enhanced personal protective equipment for health care workers involved in lung procurement and transplantation” after a surgeon who handled the donor lungs was also infected with the virus and fell ill, but later recovered.
“We would absolutely not have used the lungs if we’d had a positive COVID test,” co-author Daniel Kaul, MD, director of Michigan Medicine’s transplant infectious disease service, said in a statement from Kaiser Health News, as reported by NBC News. He added, “all the screening that we normally do and are able to do, we did.” This included routine collection of nose and throat samples from both the organ donor (a woman from the Upper Midwest, who died after suffering a severe brain injury in a car accident) and the recipient, which all tested negative for SARS-CoV-2. Read more from Health.
