US woman died after receiving coronavirus-infected lungs during organ transplantation, study reveals

The unnamed organ recipient had chronic obstructive lung disease, while her donor was another woman, who succumbed to a severe brain injury after a car crash, a report in the American Journal of Transplantation said.

The surgery took place at the University Hospital in Ann Arbor, Michigan in mid-2020. It went well, but three days later the owner of the new lungs suddenly developed high fever, low blood pressure and heavy breathing.

The patient then went into septic shock, prompting medics to test her for Covid-19. The results returned positive, and fluid samples taken from the woman’s lungs revealed the presence of the virus too.

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A surgeon who performed to the transplantation and was in contact with the donated organ, also showed symptoms of the coronavirus and tested positive. But while the medic managed to recover – his patient wasn’t so lucky.

The woman fought the disease for 61 days, but her condition kept deteriorating. She died in autumn, the paper read.

“We would absolutely not have used the lungs if we’d had a positive Covid test,” Dr. Daniel Kaul, the heads of Transplant Infectious Disease Service at the University of Michigan Medical School and one of the co-authors of the study, told Kaiser Health News.

According to the procedure, nose and throat samples were taken from both the donor and the recipient ahead of the surgery, but all came back negative for Covid-19. The donor’s family insisted that she didn’t travel or showed any symptoms of the virus like fever, cough, headache or diarrhea prior to the accident. The researches also couldn’t find any evidence of her communicating with those known to be infected with Covid-19.

The death of the lung recipient in Michigan was a “tragic,” but isolated event, that further emphasizes the need for more thorough testing of transplant donors and organs, Kaul said. Thousands of transplantations were carried out in the US last year, but it became the only proven case of the coronavirus being passed on through an organ.

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