Federal health officials confirmed that a Michigan man died from rabies after receiving a kidney from a donor who had unknowingly contracted the virus from a skunk.
This is the kind of story that can very easily get sensationalized and make people afraid of potentially life-saving medical procedures. So, let’s start with this: statistically speaking, you are much more likely to die from an asteroid than rabies.
It’s rare to contract rabies from an organ transplant. It is even rarer that a rabies-infected organ will kill you. According to a recent CDC report, a routine December 2024 transplant at an Ohio hospital went well until the recipient began collapsing into neurological fits about five weeks later. The patient was experiencing tremors, confusion, incontinence, and eventually, death.
Postmortem tests revealed rabies. This was a shock to the patient’s doctors and family, who all insisted that he had been anywhere near wildlife. While that was true, it wasn’t true of the kidney donor.
Man Dies of Rabies After Kidney Donor Was Attacked by a Skunk
While searching the donor’s medical paperwork from Idaho, investigators found the donor risk assessment interview. In it was a tiny throwaway detail that no one thought twice about, but maybe should have: the donor had been scratched by a skunk.
When the investigators followed up, the donor’s family described the October incident wherein the donor was holding a kitten in a shed when he was confronted by a skunk displaying “predatory aggression.” He eventually knocked unconscious, but not before the skunk drew blood by scratching his shin.
Within weeks, the donor experienced difficulty swallowing, walking, and staying oriented. It was all the classic rabies symptoms, though initially chalked up to chronic health issues. After collapsing at home, he was resuscitated, hospitalized, declared brain-dead, and his organs donated.
Organs are tested before donation. But rabies isn’t routinely screened for in organ donors, mainly because human cases are so uncommon and testing is complex. In this case, initial lab samples were negative for rabies, but kidney tissue biopsies later revealed a strain linked to silver-haired bats. Leaders think a bat infected a skunk, the skunk infected the donor, and the donor’s kidney infected the recipient.
This is only the fourth known case of transplant-transmitted rabies in the United States since 1978. Chances of it happening to a person in your life who needs an organ donation are slim to none, or as the CDC calls it, these kinds of events are “exceptionally rare.”
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