Michigan man received kidney transplant from donor who had fought off a skunk and was later found unresponsive
A Michigan man has died of rabies after receiving a kidney from another man who died of the disease when he was scratched by a skunk while defending a kitten, in what officials are describing as an “exceptionally rare event”.
According to a recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Michigan patient received a kidney transplant at an Ohio hospital in December 2024.
Around five weeks later, he began experiencing tremors, lower extremity weakness, confusion and urinary incontinence. He was soon hospitalized and ventilated, then died. Postmortem testing confirmed rabies, the CDC report said, baffling authorities because the recipient’s family had said he had not had any exposure to animals.
That sounds like the plot of a house md episode.
Scrubs, actually.
That’s fucking crazy. I didn’t even know that was possible. I didn’t realize rabies goes through your organs, I thought it just goes to your brain. How incredibly unlucky. RIP.
Can you test for rabies before transplanting?? Cause it seems like that should be required like yesterday…
Rabies is so rare in Americans that this may never happen again in all history.
CDC shows 17 cases between 2015-2024. The odds of a doner having rabies and being asymptomatic and dying in that time frame is astronomical.
It’s probably such an uncommon occurrence that they don’t test for it
The source body should have been rejected for donation, given their cause of death, though
That might cause the system to have slightly lower profits though. Organs aren’t cheap!
It’s simply stupid to test the doners brain for rabies when there’s a case or two a year out of 330,000,000 million Americans. And what are the odds that one of those cases is both asymptomatic and donating during that time.
Plus, if you want to add an additional test on the doner’s brain, you’ve slowed a process that needs to move fast.
what are the odds that one of those cases is both asymptomatic and donating during that time
About zero, I guess:
Around five weeks later, he began experiencing tremors, lower extremity weakness, confusion and urinary incontinence.
Maybe when someone dies from rabies, don’t use their organs?
That was a description of the recipient, not the donor. No one knew the donor was down with the rabies, but they should have known.
God lord it’s dumber than I thought!
Dude gets scratched by a skunk,
Five weeks later, a family member said, he became confused, had difficulty swallowing and walking, experienced hallucinations and had a stiff neck.
And they presumed he had a heart attack?! Jesus. Everyone involved was an idiot; the donor, the family, the doctors.
AFAIK the only way to test for it is to biopsy actual brain tissue. Which usually requires the subject to be deceased.
Well the donor was definitely deceased in this case
And apparently no doctors saw the big red flag of person dying to a fucking skunk lol
