|
National News HIV Patients Get Fresh Hopes for Donor OrgansDecember 11, 2001 A note from TheBody.com: Since this article was written, the HIV pandemic has changed, as has our understanding of HIV/AIDS and its treatment. As a result, parts of this article may be outdated. Please keep this in mind, and be sure to visit other parts of our site for more recent information! Writer and activist Larry Kramer, who has AIDS and hepatitis B, has joined 18,646 patients on the national liver transplant waiting list. Like Kramer, a significant number of people with HIV are also infected with hepatitis B or C or both. A few years ago, organ transplants for people with HIV were unthinkable, since they were not expected to live long enough to justify receiving a scarce donor organ. But things changed when the 1996 arrival of combination drug therapy markedly improved the prognosis for people with HIV. Initial reports of HIV-positive people who underwent the procedure also indicated that they tolerated the required immune-suppressing drugs better than doctors had anticipated. As a result, many surgeons say it is not ethical to deny transplants to HIV patients; however, some doctors say such transplants should be done only as part of rigorously designed studies to determine whether the procedure is truly effective. University of Pittsburgh transplant surgeon Dr. John Fung said that 14 liver transplants have been performed on HIV-positive patients at Pittsburgh and the University of Miami during the last four years. Twelve patients are still alive. One-year survival approaches 90 percent, which is comparable to that for recipients without HIV. Dr. Michelle E. Roland, an HIV specialist at the University of California at San Francisco, said that calling liver transplants for HIV-positive people either "experimental" or "routine" glosses over a host of complications and subtleties. "When insurers say there are no efficacy studies of liver transplantation for people with HIV, that is an absolutely true statement," she said. At the same time, "We want insurers to reimburse for the clinical costs of transplanting these patients." Back to other CDC news for December 11, 2001 New York Times 12.11.01; Jeff Stryker A note from TheBody.com: Since this article was written, the HIV pandemic has changed, as has our understanding of HIV/AIDS and its treatment. As a result, parts of this article may be outdated. Please keep this in mind, and be sure to visit other parts of our site for more recent information! This article was provided by U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It is a part of the publication CDC HIV/Hepatitis/STD/TB Prevention News Update.
|
|