Transplant Pair Contract Rabies

At least two patients who received organ transplants from a young woman are critically ill with rabies.

They were taken ill this week after receiving the organs early last month from an anonymous donor who had returned from a holiday in India last October. It is not known whether an animal had bitten her. She was admitted to a clinic in Heidelberg where she died in December.

Last night, doctors confirmed that the dead woman's brain revealed she had rabies. There is only one known similar case like this: four patients died in the US last year after receiving rabies-infected organs.

The patients include a man from Hannoversch-Münden, who received a kidney, and another man from Marburg, who got the woman's other kidney and the pancreas. He had just left hospital but was readmitted on Monday.

A woman from Hannover who had a lung transplant showed symptoms of the disease but was less seriously affected, doctors said.

Three other patients, in Heidelberg and Mainz, who received the woman's liver and eyes have so far not shown signs of rabies, they said.

"If there has been an infection," said Peter Sauer, head of internal medicine at the Heidelberg University clinic, which reported the suspected rabies case, "we can only hope that we started the active and passive immunisation on time."

Doctors said that the female donor had shown no symptoms of rabies while in hospital and had died of heart failure. They said, though, that she might have contracted the disease while travelling.

Ilja Stracke, spokeswoman for Deutsche Stiftung Organtransplantation, the German foundation, said: "We did the full diagnostics ... we didn't find anything, there were no symptoms. There isn't 100% safety when it comes to organ transplantation. It is possible infections can be passed on. It's impossible to rule out this risk, now or in the near future."

In Germany, an estimated 100,000 organs have been transplanted since 1963. Doctors at the Heidelberg clinic said five cases of rabies had been recorded in Germany in the past 20 years, three of whom were infected in India.