A normally life-saving procedure has ended in a incredibly rare kind of death. According to local health officials and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a person recently died from a rabies infection contracted from the kidney of a deceased donor.
WTOL, a media outlet based in Toledo, Ohio, first reported on the unusual death Wednesday, which was confirmed by health officials in Michigan and Ohio, as well as the CDC. Officials say that no one else is at risk of rabies from the tainted procedure.
“The cause of death is rabies and complications,” Carl Schmidt, a deputy coroner with the Lucas County Coroner’s Office, told WTOL. “The diagnosis was confirmed by sending tissue to the CDC.”
Rabies is a virus that can infect the brain and spinal cord of most any mammal. It’s infamous for being a practical death sentence once the infected starts to show signs of illness, such as aggression, disorientation, and a strong fear of water. Symptoms can take weeks to appear in humans, however, and death can almost always be prevented if someone gets timely treatment before this happens. Post-exposure prophylaxis is a combination of the rabies vaccine and donated antibodies.
The virus typically spreads through the saliva of infected animals, often from scratches or bites. Widespread vaccination programs in pets and improved animal control have made rabies a rare occurrence in much of the world, with fewer than 10 deaths reported annually in the U.S. But Americans do still sometimes catch rabies, usually from bats or other infected wildlife. Even rarer is a fatal case of rabies transmitted via transplantation.
The last such widely reported death in the U.S. appears to have occurred in 2013, for instance, involving a Maryland resident (other people who received organs from the deceased donor were given post-exposure prophylaxis). In 2004, a cluster of four deaths in Texas was traced back to a single decreased donor. Transplantation-related rabies is a bigger problem in China, where rabies is more commonly reported in general, but still very rare.
Donors and their organs are routinely tested for potentially serious infections or other diseases that could be transmitted to a recipient. But in its investigation of the 2013 case, the CDC noted that donors typically aren’t tested for rabies if they’re not suspected to have it. In the earlier U.S. cases, neither deceased donor was initially believed to have been killed by rabies (in retrospect, they probably were).
The recipient in this latest case received their transplant in December 2024, and died from their infection in January 2025. Though the person underwent their operation in Ohio, they lived in Michigan, making this the first human case of rabies documented in the latter state since 2009.
Health officials have conducted an investigation into the matter and determined there’s no further risk of rabies from the exposure. The University of Toledo Medical Center, where the procedure was performed, has also said that no glaring issues with how the transplant was carried out were identified.
“The health system has worked closely with public health authorities and has conducted a thorough review of this case, which found all best practices and standard safety protocols were appropriately followed,” the Center said in a statement provided to WTOL.
In other words, this appears to be an extremely rare, but nonetheless tragic freak occurrence.
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