Too sexy to be a transplant donor

The CDC has a new proposed set of transplant donor guidelines, and they are definitely on the Puritan end of the spectrum – they say a big no to having had more than one sexual partner in the past year, and that’s just for starters.

Under the new policy proposed this fall, deceased and living donors who were not monogamous in the previous 12 months would be considered at increased risk of transmitting HIV, hepatitis B and hepatitis C -- even if they had no other risk factors. The CDC says the guidelines are intended to make the donor supply safer for recipients, and they would not absolutely ban anyone from donating, especially in an exceptional or life-saving situation, but they would call for more scrutiny and testing. Critics are already up in arms about the new proposal.

“With the new guidelines, every college student in America will be high risk,” commented Dr. Harry Dorn-Arias, a transplant surgeon at the University of Virginia. “Right now, it's probably a prostitute or a guy with a needle in his arm. Next time, it will be just a young guy." Transplant experts are irate because they say the proposal arbitrarily focuses on monogamy and could limit both the number of available donors and the number of recipients willing to accept organs newly classified as risky. And with 112,000 people are on organ waiting lists and only 28,000 organ transplantations performed each year, cutting the transplant supply further will mean longer waits – and more deaths – for those on transplant waitlists.

Young people ages 20 – 24 are frequently sexually adventurous. According to a 2006-2008 report by the National Center for Health Statistics, a quarter of women and nearly 30 percent of men ages 20 to 24 said they had two or more sexual partners in the past 12 months – and that’s on a self-report survey. Chances are the incidence is greater in real life. Most of them are in their physical prime and multiple sex partners do not alter that fact.

The older guidelines, set in 1994, exclude certain groups as donors, including men who have had sex with other men within the past five years, people who've used IV drugs or exchanged sex for money or drugs in the past five years, hemophiliacs, those exposed to HIV, and people who've had sex with anyone in those categories.

The new plan requires living donors to also be screened and tested, not just for HIV, but for Hepatitis B and C, as well as other infections.

Of course, it remains to be seen how to screen a deceased potential donor about his or her lifestyle. The person’s family will certainly not have been privy to the details of their personal life.

The risk of infection from donated organs is rare but exists. And no matter how thorough a screening panel, it simply cannot anticipate every rare virus out there.

On the upside, the proposed guidelines shorten the time frame for many of the higher-risk behaviors from five years to one year.

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Image Source: Wikimedia Commons

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