Aust. Transplant Patients Infected With A.I.D.S. (Press, 17 December 1984)
This is a Generative AI summary of this newspaper article. It may contain errors or omissions. Please note that the language in the summary is reflective of the original article and the societal attitudes of the time in which it was written.
Summary: Aust. Transplant Patients Infected With A.I.D.S. (Press, 17 December 1984)
On 17 December 1984, it was reported that all kidney donors at St Vincent's Hospital in Sydney will be screened for AIDS following post-mortem examinations that revealed two transplant patients had contracted the virus from a kidney donor. The deaths of the patients, confirmed by Professor David Pennington, head of the AIDS task force, are attributed to a pneumonia specifically associated with AIDS. The donor, a homosexual male who died in a car accident, was found to be HIV positive after tests on stored serum. Although the two transplant recipients had died some time ago, the connection to AIDS was only established last week, prompting a national alert across transplant units in Australia. However, New South Wales Deputy Premier and Health Minister Ron Mulock claimed that the recipients did not die from AIDS but from other diseases. In response to the incident, Professor Pennington stated that precautions would be implemented to screen all donors for risk factors such as being homosexual, intravenous drug users, or receiving blood products. He noted that at the time of the transplants, no screening tests for AIDS were available. Furthermore, he stressed the importance of adhering to these precautions for live transplants, such as bone marrow procedures. Professor Pennington expressed confidence that if the proposed guidelines were followed, the risk of contracting AIDS through transplants would be significantly reduced. As of the report, Australia had recorded 34 confirmed cases of AIDS, with 13 resulting in deaths. The matter of AIDS was set to be a key topic during a meeting of state health ministers in Melbourne later that week.
Important Information
The text on this page is created, in the most part, using Generative AI and so may contain errors or omissions. It is supplied to you without guarantee or warranty of correctness. If you find an error or would like to make a content suggestion please get in contact
The text on this page is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 New Zealand