A Michigan patient died of rabies earlier this year after contracting the virus through an organ transplant, health officials said.
The transplant took place at an Ohio hospital in December 2024, and the patient passed away in January, according to the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services.
The United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) rabies laboratory confirmed the rabies diagnosis, and while the donor wasn’t from Michigan or Ohio, no other information is being released about them or the recipient.
“There is no threat to the general public. Health officials worked together to ensure that people, including health care providers, who were in contact with the Michigan individual were assessed for possible exposure to rabies,” a spokesperson for the Michigan health department told Global News in a Thursday email.
While organ screening is done for common diseases like HIV, hepatitis B and C and syphilis, they are not routinely tested for rabies before transplantation, according to the CDC.
Since rabies is extremely rare, standard donor screening prioritizes more common infections and conditions that could impact transplant recipients.
“If rabies is not clinically suspected, laboratory testing for rabies is not routinely performed, as it is difficult for doctors to confirm results in the short window of time they have to keep the organs viable for the recipient,” the CDC stated.
Testing for disease in organs is performed at the provincial program level following Canadian standards and regulations.
Health Canada’s Guidance on the Safety of Human Cells, Tissues, and Organs for Transplantation Regulations outlines the list of infectious diseases that are tested for in organ donations.
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Diseases include HIV, hepatitis B and C, syphilis and toxoplasmosis.
Rabies is not included on the list.
Global News reached out to Health Canada to confirm that rabies is not tested before organ donation, but did not hear back by the time of publication.
Rabies transmission through organ has happened before
Rabies is a viral disease that affects the central nervous system of mammals, including humans, and is almost always fatal once symptoms appear, according to Health Canada. It spreads through contact with saliva or blood from infected animals like bats, raccoons, skunks, or stray dogs.
Early symptoms can mimic the flu, such as fever, headache and nausea, but as the disease progresses, patients may experience difficulty swallowing, excessive salivation, and hallucinations.
Rabies remains extremely rare in humans in both the U.S. and Canada. But cases of transmission through organ donation have happened before in the U.S.
In 2013, a Maryland man died after contracting rabies through a kidney transplant. The donor was found to have died of rabies and had symptoms of the disease but was not tested before his organs were transplanted to four patients.
One of the patients died. The other three organ recipients did not display any rabies symptoms and received their rabies vaccine after.
The donor had seizures and encephalitis — a brain inflammation that can be caused by rabies — but those symptoms can also be caused by a variety of bacterial, viral and other more common conditions.
In 2004, three transplant recipients in the U.S. died of rabies after receiving lung, kidney and liver organs from an Arkansas man who had been infected by a bat.
There have also been documented cases of rabies transmission through transplanted corneas. In these rare cases, the corneas were donated by people who had unknowingly been infected with the rabies virus, leading to transmission to the recipients.
A 2011 study in the American Journal of Transplantation found that donor-derived disease transmission makes up for less than one per cent of all transplant procedures.
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