JOHANNESBURG — Doctors in South Africa say they transplanted part of a liver from a mother with HIV to her critically ill but HIV-negative child, concluding that the chance to save a life outweighed the risk of virus transmission. A liver from a donor without HIV was not available in a country where there is a chronic shortage of organs available for transplant. “In the weeks after the transplant, we thought that the child was HIV positive, because we detected HIV antibodies,” transplant surgeon Jean Botha said in a statement. But more testing by HIV experts at South Africa’s National Institute of Communicable Diseases did not find any active HIV infection in the child. And in the United States, Johns Hopkins University in recent years pioneered HIV-positive donor to HIV-positive recipient transplants.

Source: National Post October 04, 2018 11:12 UTC