The U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) announced on Tuesday that people living with HIV can now receive kidney and liver transplants from other people living with HIV.

Such transplants were once restricted only to people participating in research studies. However, the new rule, which takes effect immediately, follows a recent study in The New England Journal of Medicine which showed that kidney transplants between people with HIV had “similar high rates of overall survival and low rates of organ rejection” as transplants between HIV-negative people, the Associated Press reported.

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“This rule removes unnecessary barriers to kidney and liver transplants, expanding the organ donor pool and improving outcomes for transplant recipients with HIV,” HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra said in a statement.

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Christine Durand, a professor of medicine and oncology at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine who was the lead author of the aforementioned study said, “This study really shows without a doubt that there’s no differences between receiving a kidney from a donor with HIV versus without HIV… In some ways, it was a boring study, but it really emphasized the safety of this: There were no significant differences.”

In 2013, the U.S. lifted a 25-year ban on HIV-positive organ transplants with the passage of the HIV Organ Policy Equity Act. However, the law only allowed such transplants to occur within research studies and within conditions so strict that most organ donation centers could not follow them.

In 2019, a Johns Hopkins University surgical team performed the world’s first kidney transplant between HIV-positive individuals. Durand said she thinks that heart and lung transplants will likely follow.

The new HHS rule follows two other recent health policy developments.

In 2023, the Food and Drug Administration eased its rules on blood donations from gay and bisexual men, and last spring, a top U.S. pediatricians’ organization said mothers with HIV can breastfeed if they are taking certain medication, The Washington Post reported.

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