Woman gets heart from HIV-positive donor

A woman who received a life-saving heart donation met the donor's family for the first time on Tuesday.

The transplant happened in April at Montefiore Moses Hospital in the Bronx, New York City. Doctors there say this is the first time a heart from an HIV-positive donor was successfully transplanted into an HIV-positive recipient.

Miriam Nieves now 62 beat a heroin addiction 30 years ago but was left HIV-positive. Nieves, a former public relations professional who now lives in Westchester, north of New York City, started experiencing heart failure after problems with her kidneys. The shortage of organ donors is so acute that doctors at the hospital expanded their search to include HIV-positive donors and found a match.

In Louisiana, 1,500 miles away, 30-year-old Brittany Newton, a certified nursing assistant who worked with the elderly, died of a brain aneurysm, according to her family. After her death, her family learned she was HIV-positive. She was also an organ donor.

Doctors at Montefiore Moses Hospital transplanted her heart and kidney into Nieves successfully. There's no count of how many HIV-positive patients are among the more than 100,000 people on the nation's waiting list for an organ transplant. HIV-positive patients can receive transplants from HIV-negative donors just like anyone else.