AIDS to boot

In Yekaterinburg, a patient was infected during a transplant

The first case in the history of Russian medicine of a patient contracting HIV infection after a transplant was recorded in Yekaterinburg. Tyumen oilman Yuri K., apparently, doctors transplanted a kidney from an infected donor. In Yekaterinburg City Clinical Hospital No. 1, where the operation was performed, they say that the surgeons are in shock, and the attending physician simply does not know how to inform the patient about this. The fact of infection has already become public: local television considered it a sensation that for the first time, intrahospital transmission of the virus did not occur through a blood transfusion.

Transplantation was the only chance for the 44-year-old oil worker, and in Yekaterinburg they promised to help him. Moreover, his company allocated 400 thousand rubles for the operation and treatment. Quite soon, a suitable kidney was found: it was taken from a 25-year-old guy killed in a street fight. The transplantation was successful, and within a few days the donor organ began to take root in the body of the new host. And then the belated results of the donor’s HIV test arrived. They were positive.

Hospital No. 1 introduced kidney transplantation seven years ago. Over the past years, this operation in Yekaterinburg has been carried out about a hundred times and always ended successfully. Now doctors fear that the team of surgeons who performed the operation will be turned into “switchmen.” “We received a donor kidney, and we had only 24 hours at our disposal to carry out a high-quality operation,” says Sergei Borisovich Turkov, deputy chief physician of regional clinical hospital No. 1. - We did everything that depended on us. And suddenly such absurdity. Why did this happen? At what stage? All these questions should, in principle, be answered by HIV specialists.”

But the Sverdlovsk Regional AIDS Prevention Center completely refuses to comment on the events at Hospital No. 1. The center's chief physician, Viktor Zemerov, even told a correspondent of the Vremya Novostei newspaper that he knew nothing about this emergency. Although the fact of infection has already been confirmed in Moscow. The head of the press service of the State Sanitary and Epidemiological Supervision of Russia, Lyubov Voropaeva, says that a special commission has been created in Yekaterinburg, and today a joint commission of sanitary doctors and specialists from the Research Institute of Transplantology and Organ Typing will arrive in the Urals from Moscow by order of the Russian Minister of Health.

Sergey DIDKOVSKY, Ekaterinburg