Patient Dies After Being Given Organ from Donor With Rabies

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) just issued a report on a bizarre case involving the death of a transplant patient after he was given a kidney from a donor with rabies. The report would suggest a strong case for liability under the existing tort doctrine.

In my torts class, we discuss liability for blood and other products in hospitals. Many states have passed laws treating blood infusions as services, not products, to limit liability from contamination.

This case involved a donor in Michigan who saved a kitten from a rabid skunk. The skunk had been infected by the silver-haired bat variant of rabies.

In the struggle with the skunk, the donor was scratched on the shin. Within days, he experienced symptoms of rabies and eventually died.

What is most interesting about this report is that the family reported the incident in connection with the organ donation. However, the form did not track rabies due to the relative rarity of such infections.

The donated organs and tissues went to three other recipients. In this case, the person began to experience fever, tremors, difficulty swallowing and fear of water. The recipient died after 51 days.

The case reportedly involves only the fourth such case of rabies transmission through an organ transplant in the U.S. since 1978. As a result, the report states that “no standard guidance currently exists for addressing reported donor animal exposures by transplant teams.”

However, in this case, there was a family report of the infection. It strikes me as manifestly negligent in such a case. The calculus of risk in this case is made more difficult by the obvious time pressures in transplant cases. The question is why such organs and tissues cannot be subject to a comprehensive test for contamination or infection. Rabies tests remain more difficult than other tests, posing a practical problem for testing when time is of the essence.

What is not known is what these patients signed in terms of waivers to be recipients of transplants.

The case represents the type of bizarre scenario that we often include in final exams, where a man fights a skunk to save a kitten, dies with rabies, and then his organs kill a recipient months later. In this case, the family itself appears to have done the right thing in reporting the incident, as the staff failed to convey the information or flag the risk.