Health will allow organ donation among people with HIV

Health Minister Monica Garcia plans to repeal the June 24, 1987 decree banning organ donation among people with HIV. This was announced yesterday at an event dedicated to World AIDS Day, which is celebrated annually on December 1. To this end, the government has developed the necessary rules for public consultations. The initiative, promoted by the National Organization for Transplantation (ONT), aims to remove restrictions on organ donation among people with HIV, making their situation equal to that of other infections that do not restrict donation.

According to the ONT Donation Quality Assurance Program, over the past decade, 65 people who died of HIV could have donated their organs and enabled 165 transplants if there were no regulatory restrictions and if there were eligible HIV recipients on the list. waiting list of those who have given their consent. In turn, every year about 50 patients with HIV are placed on the waiting list for transplantation in Spain.

In the 1980s and 1990s, organ transplantation in people with HIV infection was considered a high-risk intervention. At the beginning of the century, when the prognosis of this infection changed thanks to antiretroviral therapy, the first experiments in organ transplantation in recipients with HIV began to be published with encouraging results. This has led the international scientific community to question whether HIV infection should remain an absolute contraindication for transplantation.

In Spain, this shift was reflected in the National Consensus Document adopted in 2005 by the Spanish Society of Infectious Diseases and Clinical Microbiology, the National AIDS Plan and the ONT. Today, patients infected with HIV undergo organ transplantation of all types. To date, 311 kidney transplants, 510 liver transplants, 11 lung transplants, 10 heart transplants and one pancreas and kidney transplantation have been registered in Spain, with good results and compliance with the recipient selection criteria established in the National Consensus Document.