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THURSDAY, March 28, 2019 (HealthDay News) – Baltimore surgeons have performed the world's first kidney transplant in which the living donor and recipient are HIV-positive.
The success of the operation could make the organs more accessible to patients infected with the AIDS virus.
A 35-year-old Atlanta woman who contracted HIV during her birth offered one of her kidneys to an HIV-positive stranger, and doctors from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. proceeded to the procedure on Monday.
Nina Martinez originally wanted to donate her kidney to a friend, but he died last fall, hospital officials said.
Nevertheless, she decided that she still wanted to donate, partly to help eliminate some of the stigma surrounding people living with HIV / AIDS.
"For me, it was an opportunity to be the same as anyone else," Martinez said at a news briefing Thursday. "I really wanted to do something to shake people's perceptions, usually when society thinks of HIV-positive people, thinks about people who look like they have HIV, and thinks about people in the 1980s. ".
"Someone was waiting for a kidney that needed it, and even if my kidney is infected with HIV, this kidney saved their lives," she added.
Martinez contracted HIV through a blood transfusion while she was only 6 weeks old, Johns Hopkins said. Doctors diagnosed him with the virus in the early 1990s.
Dr. Dorry Segev, a Johns Hopkins surgeon, hailed the procedure as "incredibly exciting" for HIV patients whose kidneys are at risk of stopping.
"We saw that HIV-positive people on the transplant list were dying and that, simultaneously, we could not use the organs of HIV-positive donors," Segev said at a press briefing.
Indeed, six years ago, the law prohibited American doctors from using organs taken from HIV-positive donors, even if they were used to save the lives of HIV-positive patients.
The 2013 law on HIV Organ Equality Policy (HOPE) lifted the ban imposed 25 years ago and gave Johns Hopkins surgeons legal permission to proceed. Monday's transplant, also enlightened by the United Network for Organ Sharing Network (UNOS), which oversees the US transplant system.
According to UNOS statistics, about 113,000 people are on a waiting list for an organ. Nearly three out of five transplants involve a kidney.
In a statement, Segev estimated that between 500 and 600 HIV-positive people who wished to become organ donors would die each year. Their organs could have saved more than 1,000 people if the medical community used them for transplants.
Johns Hopkins has already noted very positive results when HIV-positive patients were receiving HIV-negative organs. In addition, South Africa has successfully established a history of HIV-positive kidney transplants using deceased donor organs.
"Organ transplantation is crucial for HIV-positive patients, who die even more quickly on the waiting list than their HIV-negative counterparts," Segev said in a statement. "We are very grateful to Congress, the President and the entire transplant community for letting us use organs of HIV-positive patients to save lives instead of throwing them away, as we had to do for years. many years."
The United States has begun in recent years to transplant organs of deceased donors with HIV, as part of a research study, according to the UNUS. Since 2016, 116 kidney and liver transplants of deceased donors have been performed, the AP reported.
Doctors are worried about taking kidneys from living donors with HIV, fearing that the person's generosity will backfire if their remaining kidney is damaged by the virus or drugs that keep HIV at bay.
"The medical aspect of a living donor transplant is that we want to make sure that the donor stays healthy for the rest of his life and can live a long and healthy life with only one kidney, "explained Segev.
But the new anti-HIV drugs are safer and more effective, making the risks badociated with this type of live donor transplant comparable between people with the virus or not, he added.
In a statement, UNOS called the new transplant "a positive milestone in the HOPE process." All of these transplants are part of a research effort that is being closely monitored for safety and security. donors and recipients ".
More information
The United Network for Organ Sharing says more about transplantation statistics.
SOURCES: March 28, 2019, press conference with: Nina Martinez and Dorry Segev, MD, Surgeon, Johns Hopkins Medicine Full Transplant Center, Baltimore; March 28, 2019, press release, Johns Hopkins Medicine Comprehensive Transplant Center, Baltimore; United Network for Organ Sharing, Statement, March 28, 2019; Associated press
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