Doctors are calling for more elaborate testing for the COVID-19 disease before transplants. A woman from Michigan died after getting ill with the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and soon after she received a double-lung transplant, according to HuffPost.com. The weird part is that the donor tested negative for COVID and didn’t show signs of infection.
Dr. Daniel Kaul, the director of the transplant infectious disease service from Michigan Medicine, declared for Kaiser Health News:
We would absolutely not have used the lungs if we’d had a positive Covid test,
All the screening that we normally do and are able to do, we did.
Usually before an organ transplant, doctors collect throat and nose samples from both the donor and the recipient to test them for the coronavirus. The doctors did the same thing this time.
Dead after a car accident
The lung donor was a woman who died of a brain injury after a car accident, and her samples showed no COVID infection after getting tested several hours before the transplant. According to the family, the donor didn’t even have any recent cough, headaches, fever, or diarrhoea. She also didn’t travel recently.
The woman receiving the transplant was a chronic obstructive lung disease patient from the University Hospital in Ann Arbor. After the patient has been dealing with low blood pressure, fever, and respiratory problems three days after the surgery, the doctors tested samples from the throat, nose, and lower respiratory system of the woman. While the throat and nose samples have shown negative results for COVID infection, the lower respiratory sample tested positive.
The relevant study was published in the American Journal of Transplantation, and it also revealed that the doctors dealt with the first confirmed US case of SARS-CoV-2 transmission from donor to recipient.
