Woman dies after getting infected kidney

BOSTON, May 13 (UPI) -- Health officials said a 70-year-old woman died in Boston after receiving a kidney infected with lymphocyte choriomeningitis virus.

A 57-year-old man who received a kidney from the same donor is also infected with the hard-to-detect virus, LCMV, The Boston Globe said Tuesday.

The donor was a 49-year-old homeless man who suffered brain damage after cardiac arrest, the newspaper said. LCMV, which is often transmitted by rodents, is usually unnoticed by healthy people. Doctors said three transplant patients from Massachusetts and Rhode Island island died of the virus in 2005.

The man was considered a high-risk donor because he lived on the streets. Dr. Alfred DeMaria of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health said patients are willing to accept organs from high-risk donors because waiting too long for a transplant is also a risk.

"People are literally dying for organs," DeMaria told the newspaper. "The list of potential things you can test for is enormous. But balancing that against the risk of not getting the organs, you have to make some

decisions about what's feasible and what's not feasible to test for."