A transplant patient from Michigan has died after receiving some lungs from someone infected with COVID-19, reports the Washington Post.
Last fall, the woman underwent surgery for a double lung transplant. Three days after her surgery, the woman developed pneumonia and began to show symptoms of the coronavirus, including high fever and difficulty breathing.
It was later determined that the woman, who died three months later as a result of the virus, developed COVID-19 from her lung transplant.
The Post reports that the transplant and the donor tested negative for the virus within 12-48 hours after surgery. The donor’s lungs showed no sign of infection, and the donor’s family said the woman had no history of travel or symptoms.
The cases were confirmed when fluid samples from the lungs taken before and after the operation were tested.
Daniel Kaul, the woman’s doctor and director of the Infectious Disease Transplant Service at Michigan Medicine, said such incidents can happen, but that they are very rare.
“This is at least the first proven case of COVID-19 transmission via organ transplantation in the United States,” Kaul told The Washington Post.
He published his findings not to scare people into getting organ transplants, but to raise awareness for the need for rigorous testing, he said.
“The reason we chose to report it is because we think it’s very important that people in the transplant community are aware of this transmission so that we can work to have a system where [respiratory] cancer samples are checked at all lung donors. ”