Kidney Transplants Found Safe in HIV Patients

"People infected with the AIDS virus can safely receive a kidney transplant, researchers reported on Wednesday. The finding, published in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine, is good news for people with HIV who are more prone to kidney disease, in part because of the drugs they must take to stay healthy. Before drug cocktails turned HIV from a death sentence to a chronic condition, patients were not eligible to receive a kidney. But now they can. 'Patient and graft survival are really pretty good and it approximates the general population,' Dr. Peter Stock of the University of California San Francisco, who led the study, said in a telephone interview."