US News

Rabies death via organ transplant

Four people received donated organs from a man unknowingly infected with rabies, leading to a rare human death more than a year later that has authorities scrambling to treat the other three patients, federal health officials said yesterday.

The man who died lived in Maryland and had received a kidney. The recipients of the donor’s other kidney, heart and liver are receiving anti-rabies shots, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in a news release yesterday.

Those patients live in Florida, Georgia and Illinois.

The donor died in Florida in 2011 after moving there from North Carolina.

The CDC said it’s working with public-health officials and medical facilities in thefive states to identify people who were in close contact with the donor or the four organ recipients.

Those people might also need treatment, the agency said.

The Maryland patient’s death more than a week ago prompted an investigation by state health officials that led to the announcement Tuesday of the state’s first human death from rabies since 1976.

Such deaths are rare, with typically just one to three cases diagnosed per year in the United States, the CDC said.

The investigation revealed that the Maryland recipient had no reported animal exposures, the usual source of rabies transmission to humans.

The donor died at a Florida medical facility. Rabies was only recently confirmed as the cause of death after the current investigation began in Maryland, the agency said.