Unusual Transplant-Associated Infections: Just How Unusual?

In 2013, 28,955 organ transplants were performed in this country. Of these, 22,967 were conducted using organs procured from deceased donors. As impressive as this number may seem, the demand is even greater, with over 123,000 people currently awaiting an organ transplant. The Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network, or OPTN, attempts to increase the number of and access to transplants while working to reduce the risk of transmission of disease from organ donors to recipients. While some organ transplantations are life-saving procedures, serious illness and death can occur from undetected infections in donor organs and tissues.

Transplant centers have very little time to evaluate if the need for transplant for a particular recipient outweighs the possible risk of infection from a potential donor. In the case of transplants from deceased donors, time and other factors limit the testing that can be performed prior to transplant and for each donor there is the potential to infect multiple recipients.  In addition to laboratory testing, all potential deceased donors undergo a medical risk assessment to screen for potential infectious agents.  However, complete and accurate information can be very difficult to obtain at the time of organ donation. Over the past decade, new efforts in surveillance, detection, and screening of health risks have been employed to make transplants safer and to ensure that recipients have the best outcomes possible.

This session of Public Health Grand Rounds presented some of the common themes that have emerged in unusual transplant-transmitted infections. Specifically, we heard about the work that CDC and partners in the organ transplantation community are actively doing to further reduce the risk of unusual transplant-associated infections.