by Jesse Marx
June 2, 2016
As expected, a bill that allows for organ transplants between HIV-positive patients soared through the legislator, becoming law on Friday thanks to Gov. Jerry Brown’s signature.
Senate Bill 1408 had been working its natural course through Sacramento last month until a University of California San Francisco surgeon named Peter Stock implored the Attorney General’s Office to speed things up. He wrote in a letter about two HIV-positive patients who meet the criteria for a liver transplant, but cannot go through with the procedure and don’t have the time to wait.
Stock’s letter goes on to cite “approximately 70 other HIV-positive patients” who are on his hospital’s kidney and liver waiting list.
The surgery is permissible by federal law, but prohibited in California and other states.
The transplant bill was the work of state Sen. Ben Allen of Redondo Beach and co-sponsors such as Equality California, a leading LGBT advocacy group, which is working to modernize a host of laws stigmatizing, even criminalizing, people for merely living with the virus.
“They were passed generally in the 1980s when there was a lack of understanding and a lot of fear,” said EQCA executive director Rick Zbur. Last week’s victory was but the first of several he envisions over the next year.
Republican Assembly Leader Chad Mayes was added as a co-author to the transplant bill after he helped revive it by using a rare technical work-around to declare it an urgent matter. Until last week, the bill had been sitting in the Assembly, where committees officially concluded for the session.