Michigan Man Dies of Rabies After Kidney Transplant from Donor Who Fought Skunk

A Michigan man died of rabies less than two months after receiving a kidney transplant from a donor who fought a skunk, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said.

The man — whose identity was not made public by the agency — received a kidney transplant from an Idaho donor at an Ohio hospital in December 2024, and died in late January 2025, just 51 days after obtaining the organ, the CDC reported Thursday.

Five weeks after receiving the kidney transplant, the victim began experiencing “tremors, lower extremity weakness, confusion, and urinary incontinence,” the federal agency explained.

By the sixth week, the man was hospitalized with “fever, hydrophobia, dysphagia, and autonomic instability,” and placed on a ventilator two days after being admitted to the medical facility, the CDC said.

Doctors ended up contacting the Ohio Department of Health and CDC on the recipient’s fourth day in the hospital, after his signs and symptoms made them suspect rabies.

The man was pronounced dead on the seventh day, with postmortem testing later confirming that he had been infected with the rabies virus, leaving officials perplexed, as the victim’s family said he hadn’t had any exposure to animals.

But a second review of the Donor Risk Assessment Interview (DRAI) questionnaire found that the Idaho donor had been scratched by a skunk, the CDC’s report noted.

Officials then interviewed the donor’s family, which led to additional details that were not included in the DRAI questionnaire.

In October 2024, the donor fought off a skunk as it tried to attack his kitten, resulting in a scratch to his shin. The altercation ended with the skunk being left unconscious and the Idaho man attributing the animal’s aggressive behavior as merely predatory instincts toward his pet.

In search of answers, officials also conducted “a multiweek laboratory traceback investigation” in which kidney biopsy samples were taken from the donor, resulting in the detection of a strain “consistent with a silver-haired bat rabies,” the CDC said.

This suggested that the rabies virus had been transmitted through the donor’s kidney.

“Although rabies virus is typically transmitted through mammalian animal bites or scratches, human-to-human transmission has occurred through organ and tissue transplantation,” the CDC noted.

In the case of the Michigan man, officials suggested “a likely three-step transmission chain in which a rabid silver-haired bat infected a skunk, which infected the donor, and led to infection of the kidney recipient.”

The agency went on to disclose that the kidney recipient was not the only person to recently obtain anatomical material from the Idaho donor, citing three individuals who had received cornea tissue grafts.

As a precautionary measure, the cornea recipients had their grafts removed and received Post-Exposure Prophylaxis (PEP) — an emergency medicine needed to be taken in a timely fashion to ensure the rabies virus is not fatal.

None of the cornea recipients have developed signs or symptoms compatible with rabies, the CDC said.

Meanwhile, a concurrent investigation into the matter identified 370 people who had potentially been exposed to the Idaho donor or Michigan recipient, 357 of which completed risk assessments. Among those 357 individuals, 46 were prescribed PEP.

In its report, the CDC maintained that “the risk for any transplant-transmitted infection, including rabies, is low,” and noted that this most recent case makes for only “the fourth reported transplant-transmitted rabies event in the United States since 1978.”

Alana Mastrangelo is a reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on Facebook and X at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.