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Presenter: Leslie, Wolf, Atlanta, United States
Authors: Leslie Wolf, Rachel Hulkower
Legalizing HIV-positive organ donation to HIV-positive recipients: One giant leap toward addressing organ donation waiting list burden
Leslie Wolf1, Rachel Hulkower1
1College of Law, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, United States
In the United States today, over 115,000 patients are waiting for organ transplantation, but, in 2012, only 28,051 organs were transplanted from living and deceased donors. The gap between the supply and demand continues to grow, while thousands of patients die annually awaiting organ transplantation.
US laws that ban transplantation of organs from donors who are HIV-infected , even when the recipient is HIV-infected, exacerbate this gap. Such limits may have been necessary early in the HIV/AIDS epidemic, when there were no effective treatments and patients typically died within a year or two of an AIDS diagnosis. Today, however, with access to effective antiretroviral therapies, people living with HIV have life expectancies similar to those without HIV and now also add to the number of patients awaiting organ transplantation.
Eliminating legal barriers to transplantation of organs from HIV-infected donors could alleviate the shortage of organs for both HIV-infected and non-infected transplantation candidates. This would occur by increasing the pool of organs available to HIV-infected transplantation candidates, moving them off the transplant list, and allocating remaining organs to those remaining on the list. This presentation will describe the laws and policies prohibiting organ donation by those who are HIV-infected, the need for and evidence supporting a policy change, and recommend ways to accomplish that policy change.
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