A Michigan transplant patient died after receiving a pair of lungs from someone infected with COVID-19, the Washington Post reports.
Last fall, the woman underwent surgery for a double lung transplant. Three days after her surgery, the woman had contracted pneumonia and began to show symptoms of the coronavirus, including a high fever and difficulty breathing.
It was later determined that the woman, who died three months later as a result of the virus, had developed COVID-19 from her lung transplant.
The Post reports that both the transplant recipient and donor tested negative for the virus within 12-48 hours of surgery. The donor’s lungs showed no sign of infection, and the donor’s family said the woman had no travel history or symptoms.
The cases were confirmed when fluid samples from the lungs taken before and after surgery were tested.
Daniel Kaul, the woman’s physician and director of the Michigan Medicine Transplant Infectious Diseases Service, said these types of incidents can happen, but 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 did not publish his findings to scare people about organ transplants, but to make people aware of the need for rigorous testing, he said.
“The reason we chose to report this is that we think it is very important that people in the transplant community are aware of this transfer so that we can work towards a system with lower [respiratory] tract samples are checked for all lung donors. ”