The patient had the organ transplanted at a hospital in Ohio in December and died in January, Michigan Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson Lynn Sutfin said.
A subsequent investigation that also involved the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Ohio Department of Health determined the patient got rabies from the donated organ. Sutfin did not specify which organ was transplanted.
And if it’s only 10 deaths per year, and there was a previous death like roughly 10 years ago, that’s at about 2%, which I assume is reasonably high enough to test for.
Your math is off by a bit there. In 2024 alone there were ~48,000 organ transplants performed in the US. Now, that was a record high. So if all ~10 people who died of rabies in 2024 had been organ donors and somehow it wasn’t caught that they died from rabies that’s still only a 0.02% chance of getting an infected organ. That number is still wrong because all of those cases were caught and their organs would not have been donated, plus only about 58% of the adult US population are listed as organ donors. Also, it’s fewer than 10 people, not ~10 people. The actual average number of people who have died from diagnosed rabies in the US since 2000 is ~2.5 per year.
So, overall, the chance of a registered organ donor dying from rabies and their organs still being donated is remarkably low.
Where are you getting that 2%?
I assume that 2 rabies deaths in 10 years for however many organ transplants in that same period is much less than a 2% incidence. A quick google tells me that there were over 48k organ transplants in the US in 2024 alone.