Patient being closely watched after organ-donor alert

University of Florida physicians at Shands at UF medical center are closely monitoring a transplant patient after an organ donor in Mississippi was posthumously diagnosed with a very rare infection.

The Shands patient received one of four organs taken from a donor at the University of Mississippi Medical Center Jackson, or UMMC. Experts from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who were contacted by the UMMC, believe that the organ donor was infected by Balamuthia amoeba.

The Shands patient has shown no signs of infection.

The Balamuthia bacteria lives in soil and enters the body through the respiratory tract or breaks in the skin, according to the CDC. It is not contagious from person-to person and infection is rare, with fewer than 70 known cases occurring in the United States since it was first identified in 1986. Infections are not detected through conventional organ-donor screening techniques.

Two patients who received organs at other sites from the same donor have become ill. A fourth patient who received an organ from the donor in Mississippi also remains asymptomatic. Further details about the Shands patient are confidential because of privacy regulations.

UMMC officials notified the CDC and all medical centers receiving organs from the donor on Thursday evening and today made a public announcement at a news conference.

For more information, visit: http://publicaffairs.umc.edu/transplant_release.html