The patient had the organ transplanted at a hospital in Ohio in December and died in January, Michigan Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson Lynn Sutfin said.
A subsequent investigation that also involved the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Ohio Department of Health determined the patient got rabies from the donated organ. Sutfin did not specify which organ was transplanted.
I know someone that’s involved in the organ transplant industry. What I was told is that when someone is on life support, the hospital and agency involved in the transplantation process aggressively try to get the family to sign off on the organ harvest, without full confirmation that the person is actually brain dead. It happened in KY in 2021
I donated my mother’s organs back in 2014. While my mother was on life support the doctors didn’t mention it once. Once they confirmed she was brain dead and were able to show it my brothers and I we immediately told them they could take their organs. The biggest problem we had is they wanted to keep her alive longer than we wanted. It was getting close to her bday and we didn’t want her to die on her birthday so we told them the day before is the latest they can do it or we weren’t donating. They found recipients that day and we removed her from life support the next day. She died a day before her birthday.
There wasn’t any pressure nor did they have to try and convince us. Though my whole family has the mindset that we don’t need them after we are dead so just take what you need.
Just because there was an incident I would not call that a structural problem. We NEED organs to help other people survive, please don’t scare people off from donating them.
Yeah, of course we need to have strict rules and guidelines on how all this has to happen, but please don’t make it sound like if you’re badly injured that a doctor will simply write you off for money, that doesn’t happen.
Not nearly well publicized enough.
While I believe organ donation should be opt out rather than opt in, I also think that it should be a strictly non-profit with severe criminal penalties for putting any dollar value on the organs.
Doctors, labs, nurses, etc all get what they normally get, but fuck the organ harvesting industry in general.
Does this mean that whoever dontated the organ also died from rabies without having been accurately diagnosed, or does it mean that someone was carrying rabies?
If someone died of rabies, it would certainly be known that it was rabies. The symptoms are pretty obvious and it’s not likely it would be mistaken for anything else.
More likely, they were infected and died of some other cause before symptoms started showing, which can take as little as two weeks or potentially over a year.
There’s even some evidence that it can be longer. I found one that was a 6 year incubation.
Jesus H. Christ, that’s daunting…
Yeah, its a really crazy virus. If you get bit or scratched by a mammal, that you don’t know for certain is vaccinated, get the vaccine.
Agreed, same deal as with tetanus. The last time that I got cut by rusty metal and went to the hospital, the intake nurses seemed annoyed with me for showing up with such a minor injury (two stitches needed only). When the MD checked my records, they told me that it was a good thing I’d come in for the stitches and tetanus shot, because my previous one’s span of effect would have ended at a few months earlier. You can’t take this shit for granted, if you blow it off or delay treatment it could kill you. No lockjaw for me, thank you very much.
But also, tetanus is commonly misunderstood. Scapes and scratches are extremely unlikely to result in tetanus, regardless of what causes it. Rust isn’t any more likely to transmit tetanus.
Tetanus is an anaerobic microbe that can only really survive in deep cuts and punctures where air isn’t able to reach the wound. The spores are basically everywhere… But the spores only bloom and become dangerous when they come into contact with blood. Once they bloom, oxygen will kill them. So you don’t need to worry about it for surface-level scratches and scrapes, because the air will kill off any blooms. The only reason it is commonly associated with rust is because one of the more common puncture wounds is from stepping on rusty things.
Huh, interesting. Thanks for the info, I was under the misconception that it was directly tied to the rusty metal itself.
Anything deep enough to warrant stitches should absolutely be treated in a hospital imo.
Can confirm, even minor effects are lifelong and annoying AF.
I used to live in an old farmhouse. Drafty as fuck. There was a bat who kept getting inside every few months, and I’d just shoo it out or catch it and let it go outside. One night it got inside and in the course of looking for a way out, it accidentally scratched my daughter. It barely even broke her skin—there was the tiniest mark where blood welled just the slightest bit.
So when I captured him, I had to take him in for testing. Which I hated, knowing it was a death sentence, but you can’t take your chances with rabies at fucking all.
Of course, the bat wasn’t rabid, my daughter was just fine, and we probably had to suffer a few more mosquitoes that year. That was the last time we had any bats in our house.
Now, we have a very nice back yard with a deck we use a lot in the evenings and I wish I had my little bat buddy back to eat all the tasty bugs during the summer.
That was absolutely the right thing to do for your family. It sucks about your bat buddy though.
If you want to help bats, you can put up a bat house. There are plans for ones online to build one yourself. Bat are really struggling, between white nose fungus and humans their populations are really declining.
And keep a lookout for bats in need, when they get hurt they can be help. There might be a licensed bat rescue near you that could save them. I found a bat in my attic that had fallen into a bucket of water. It was winter and there was ice in with him! I was able to get him in a box and took him to a rehab the next day. He made a full recovery and was released that spring.
Bucket the bat being looked over by the rehaberLove that story, thank you so much for sharing! I do want to build a bat box this year.
Yeah, imagine getting rabies symptoms, knowing you’re going to die, and having no memory of any event that may have led to the infection.
A literal nightmare scenario.
“You’re 100% going to die, but we need to know when you caught it in case it was incidentally passed to someone else.”
shrugs
For what it’s worth, I saw a comment on Reddit that pretty much said this. They heard it from a nurse who works in Ohio talking about the case.
They were more than likely infected but not yet showing symptoms. Carrying rabies but not a carrier of rabies. If you get bit in the foot, it takes awhile to reach your brain.
Especially if they’re tall.
Episode in Scrubs…
What a terrible way to die
It would’ve been far preferable to simply not wake up from that surgery.
According to the CDC, fewer than 10 people die annually from rabies in the U.S. And it happening due to organ transplants is very rare, but not unheard of; in 2013, a patient who received a kidney transplant died from rabies.
So it’s happened before…cool cool, cool…
And if it’s only 10 deaths per year, and there was a previous death like roughly 10 years ago, that’s at about 2%, which I assume is reasonably high enough to test for.
Your math is off by a bit there. In 2024 alone there were ~48,000 organ transplants performed in the US. Now, that was a record high. So if all ~10 people who died of rabies in 2024 had been organ donors and somehow it wasn’t caught that they died from rabies that’s still only a 0.02% chance of getting an infected organ. That number is still wrong because all of those cases were caught and their organs would not have been donated, plus only about 58% of the adult US population are listed as organ donors. Also, it’s fewer than 10 people, not ~10 people. The actual average number of people who have died from diagnosed rabies in the US since 2000 is ~2.5 per year.
So, overall, the chance of a registered organ donor dying from rabies and their organs still being donated is remarkably low.
Where are you getting that 2%?
I assume that 2 rabies deaths in 10 years for however many organ transplants in that same period is much less than a 2% incidence. A quick google tells me that there were over 48k organ transplants in the US in 2024 alone.
Scrubs episode come to life.
That episode was actually based on a real event from 2004
The moment you start blaming yourself…
This was not the kind of nightmare fuel I expected when I logged on to Lemmy today.
It’s all anxiety fuel. Gulp gulp.
I’m not sure rabies is screened in donors. Thats brutal.
For good reason, it’s extremely rare.
Edit: The statistic i looked up, is less than 10 cases a year. It would be a waste of resources to test for rabies on every organ donor. But I wouldn’t be surprised if they start testing now.
A quick search shows rabies testing is $80 to ~$200. Given the cost and time a transplant takes I would say testing for rabies would be insignificant. But health insurance companies are assholes so they probably would not cover the cost due to the rarity of the disease. Cheaper for them to let people die and families sue.
That’s fair, but where do you draw the line at testing for diseases? There are so many things a patient could have. I don’t think its just about insurance companies.
Edit: my point is, at some point you are wasting precious time for the people who need the organs, and they might die. Testing for extremely rare disease/illnesses might even be considered irresponsible. You’re getting diminishing returns testing for super rare stuff, and since there are so many things that are rare, you have to make a call about what to actually test.
It takes 24-72 hours to confirm if an animal has rabies. That’s just not time that organ donations have.
Are you responding to the right person? That was kind of my point. Patients die waiting for test results.
I think they were agreeing with you
Yeah, I see that now. I assumed they meant to respond to OP.
Ya I get it, that would be expensive and impractical.
I’m pretty sure it isn’t part of any normal testing. Maybe if there were symptoms in the donor that indicated rabies or their family noted they had interactions with wild animals, but typically I think it’s mostly hepatitis, HIV, syphilis, toxoplasmosis, cytomegalovirus, chagas, and west Nile that are always checked for.
you got it! I’m just wrapping up schooling for med lab so thanks for the refresher!
Plus the test for rabies needs brain tissue, cant just test blood or the organ to be transplanted
Michiganders: “And that’s why you can’t trust Ohio”
I didn’t need another reason.
Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuck that. You better drop my ass into a coma or straight up kill me before I have to go through a rabies death.
“How did the organ donor die?!?!”
“Oh, rabies.”
I just read more than I thought was enough. https://www.news-medical.net/health/Why-is-the-Rabies-CFR-So-High.aspx
I’m sure RFK’s CDC will get right to the bottom of what happened here and prevent it from happening again /s
More vitamin A would have saved them. /s
And methylene blue! Sure it gives you diarrhea, but its blue!
If everyone has rabies, then, no one has rabies!
I am so glad I got transplanted last may because I think dialysis for 4 years might be preferable to receiving any kind of really serious medical procedures while this clown show is in charge.
They got the organ in December. While this administration is a clown show, I don’t see how that’s relevant.
Hey, congrats!
That had to have been a huge relief, finally getting the transplant you needed.
true.
dealing with insurance and prescriptions though…
Yeah, sorry about that. I work for an insurance company, but not for much longer. (Not that I ever made that worse for you, I am/was in collections.)
This clown might stay for a good while if decent Americans won’t take action.
