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Organ donation and transplantation between HIV-positive people is now legal in the state of California.
On May 27, Governor Jerry Brown signed Senate Bill 1408, a new piece of legislation that protects surgeons who transplant organs from HIV-positive donors into HIV-positive patients from being penalized by the state’s medical board. President Barack Obama’s HOPE Act technically reversed the federal ban on this procedure back in 2013, but as Medical Daily previously reported, there’s been a delay in uptake. Apparently the National Institutes of Health needed time to “properly iron out the act’s guidelines,” so up until now in California, doctors were criminals and even faced jail time if they condoned HIV transplantation and donation, Tech Times reported.
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The surgeons at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore had a similar feeling in March when they were approved to conduct the first HIV-positive organ transplant in the U.S. Dr. Dorry Segev, an associate professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins, told NPR that both HIV-positive and negative patients would benefit from the ban reversal when it comes to the organ transplant waiting list.
“Imagine now we take hundreds or maybe thousands of people off of the list, then everybody behind them moves forward,” he said. “So people with HIV are benefited directly and everybody else on the list is benefitted indirectly. And we’re all very excited to get started.”
Too bad California doesn’t have the ability to make its own blood donor rules. Thanks to the bigots in Washington, males STILL cannot donate blood if they have had sex with another male even once after 1977.
Yeah, I know. There’s been a lot of discussion about the decriminalization of HIV, but so far, it’s all talk.
Explicitly forbidding organ transplantation from HIV positive to HIV positive persons by federal/state law seems regulation at an incorrect level. A better law (assuming there is a working administration, not dysfunctional) would ban unsafe transplantation procedures and practices that do not improve the condition of the patient. Maybe a list of banned and deprecated practices could be compiled regularly by the health care officials or given as a decree or executive order, if needed.
Ice Swimmer:
In uStates? Not likely. Thanks to Reagan utterly ignoring HIV, and people finding out about it in all the wrong fucking ways, there was a rush to panic and criminalize everything and everyone associated with HIV. Things aren’t much better now, because very little has changed in that regard, even though HIV is no longer a death sentence, and quite manageable with the proper medical routine.
People here are still acting like it’s the effing ’70s / ’80s.