Man dies after saving kitten from skunk – and passes rabies to kidney recipient | Michigan
A Michigan man died of rabies after receiving a kidney from another man. The man died of disease when he was scratched by a skunk while protecting a kitten. Authorities describe it as an “extraordinarily rare event.”
According to a recently published report Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Michigan patient received a kidney transplant at an Ohio hospital in December 2024.
About five weeks later, he began to experience tremors, weakness in the lower extremities, confusion, and urinary incontinence. He was taken to hospital soon after, ventilated, and later died. Postmortem tests confirmed he had rabies, surprising authorities because the recipient’s family said he had not been exposed to animals, according to the CDC report.
Doctors then reviewed records about the kidney donor, a man in Idaho, and discovered that on the Donor Risk Assessment Interview (DRAI) questionnaire the man said he had been scratched by a skunk.
When asked, the family explained that a few months earlier, in October, she was keeping a kitten in a shed on her country property when approached by a skunk that displayed “predatory aggression towards the kitten”.
The man fought the animal in an encounter the report said “rendered the skunk unconscious,” but not before receiving a “bleeding shin scrape,” although the man did not think he had been bitten.
Five weeks later, a family member said he became confused, had difficulty walking, swallowing and walking, had hallucinations and his neck became stiff. Two days later, he was found unresponsive at home after a presumed heart attack. Although he was resuscitated and taken to hospital, he never regained consciousness and was “declared brain dead and removed from life support” a few days later.
The report states that many of his organs, including his left kidney, were donated.
After suspecting the kidney recipient had rabies, authorities returned to test laboratory samples from the donor; Rabies tests were negative. But biopsy samples taken directly from his kidneys detected a strain “consistent with silver-haired bat rabies”; This suggests that he actually died of rabies and passed it on to the donor.
The investigation suggested a “probably three-stage chain of transmission” in which a bat infected a skunk, the skunk infected the donor, the skunk’s kidney then infected the donor.
This is only the fourth incident of rabies transmitted through organ transplants reported in the United States since 1978, the CDC said. The CDC noted that the risk of any transmission-transmitted infection, including rabies, is extremely low.
Learning that all three people received corneal grafts from the same donor, authorities immediately removed the grafts and administered Post-Exposure Prophylaxis (PEP) to prevent infection. The report stated that three people showed no symptoms.
The CDC report noted that in the U.S., family members often provide information about infectious disease risk factors, including the potential donor’s exposure to animals. Rabies is typically “excluded from routine donor pathogen testing due to its rarity in humans in the United States and the complexity of diagnostic testing.”
“In this case, hospital staff treating the donor were initially unaware of skunk scratch and attributed her preadmission signs and symptoms to chronic comorbidities,” the report said.
In an interview with New York TimesD., director of immunocompromised host infectious diseases at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. Lara Danziger-Isakov described the incident as “an extraordinarily rare event” and added that “overall the risk is extremely small.”
