Organ Transplants In HIV-Positive Patients Now Legal In California

California Governor Jerry Brown has signed an emergency legislation allowing a man with HIV to receive part of his husband's liver who is also HIV-positive before the surgery becomes too dangerous.

On Friday, May 27, Governor Jerry Brown signed Senate Bill1408, a new legislation that protects ensures the protection of surgeons who transplant organs from HIV-positive donors to HIV-positive patients from being punished by the state's medical board.

According to a report by Medical Daily, President Barack Obama's HOPE Act technically turned the federal ban on this procedure around in 2013, but there has been a delay in the uptake. The National Institute of Health allegedly needed time to "properly iron out the act's guidelines," so until the present time in California, doctors were considered criminals and even go through jail time if they ignored HIV transplantation and donation, Tech Times reported.

The ban was actually because HIV/AIDS was once considered a deadly disease doctors knew so little about. The virus had also been transmitted in in "a number of patients with solid-organ transplants," Dr. Peter Stock, of the University of California, San Francisco, told NPR. Other doctors were also scared that the immunosuppressive drugs given to transplant patients would cause more harm to the patients' immune systems already compromised by the disease.

Just recently, Stock came across a wall when he was preparing a patient who was HIV-positive to have a partial liver transplant. The donor also tested positive for HIV but is healthy enough to give a part of his liver. This happened when the procedure was still not legalized in the state of California.

In a letter Stock wrote to the legislators, he expressed how concerned he is for the patients who are in the situation because their health is failing. He also said that he is concerned that by the time the Legislature acts on legalizing the procedure, the patients would not be able to receive a transplant due to deterioration or unavailability of a donor.

The Senate Bill 1408 can "save a life this month. "We now have the green light and we can start doing transplants using HIV-positive donors. Next week, we will start screening the list. We have a few people we know about who are anxious to move forward," said Stock.

Surgeons at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore went through a similar ordeal in March when they approved to conduct the first HIV-positive organ transplant in the United States, Dr. Dorry Segev, an associate professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins, told NPR that the patients, either HIV-positive or negative will benefit from the ban being reversed when it comes to organ transplant waiting list.

"Imagine now we take hundreds or maybe thousands of people off of the list, then everybody behind them moves forward," he said. "So people with HIV are benefited directly and everybody else on the list is benefitted indirectly. And we're all very excited to get started."

Among the 120,892 people in dire need of an organ to save their lives, 77,830 are active waiting list candidates (at the time of writing), according to The Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN). And someone new is added to that list every 10 minutes with HIV-positive people bearing a greater burden of kidney and liver failure.