Kidney Transplant Left This Patient With a Deadly Tick Infection

A 24-year-old man from Wisconsin who underwent a kidney transplant received not only a new kidney but also Ehrlichia chaffeensis, a bacteria spread by ticks. The infected kidney came from a 33-year-old male donor from Minnesota, and both men developed illnesses soon after the operations.

According to a report published by the CDC, the 33-year-old donor had traveled to Kansas on a hunting trip before the surgery. It was there, out in the woods amongst the leaves where ticks love to hide, that one of them sunk its tiny jaws into his skin.

Upon his return, he passed all of the medical screenings necessary to move ahead with the donation. It wasn’t until after the procedure that he started to develop a rash and muscle pain.

The donor’s condition was originally misdiagnosed as rhabdomyolysis, a condition that breaks down muscle tissue and leads to the release of muscle fiber into the blood. It wasn’t until a week after the transplant that the 24-year-old Wisconsinite kidney recipient started to feel some joint pain and developed a fever.

Tests revealed the illness wasn’t rhabdomyolysis at all but ehrlichiosis, a bacterial infection transmitted by the bite of infected ticks.

Thankfully the story does not take a depressing turn. Once the cause of the infection was identified, doctors treated both patients with simple antibiotics that expunged the tick bacteria from their systems.

For anyone out there reading this who is on the waiting list for an organ transplant or knows someone who is, know that a case like this is extraordinarily rare. Any illness that can be contracted from a tick will almost certainly be contracted through a bite and not through an organ transplant. This story is an anomaly and extremely far from the norm.

While getting ehrlichiosis from a transplant can conceivably happen, because it just did, the chances of it happening again are so low that you probably have a better chance of winning the lottery. Still, it’s probably best that you remind your doctors to screen for Ehrlichia just in case.