Epidemiology of infectious diseases in organ donors in Australia and New Zealand

Transplantation is life-saving for patients with end-stage organ disease. However, immunosuppressive medications are required to prevent organ rejection. As a result, infections are an important and common complication, which contribute to morbidity and mortality. Some of these can be acquired from the transplant donor, and robust testing procedures have evolved over time to detect these. These help inform whether an organ is safe to transplant, and whether any risk mitigation strategies need to be undertaken afterwards. While testing for many infections has now been routinely performed in Australia for many decades, this data has not previously been analysed leaving a gap in our knowledge regarding the frequency of various infections, making hard to understand risks and develop policy moving forward in a systematic way. The aims of this project are to: 1. Define the epidemiology of infectious diseases in Australian organ donors over time. 2. Understand the history of donor testing performed over time. 3. Explore risk factors for infection, and infection-related factors associated with successful transplantation. We hypothesize that there may have been changes in the seroprevalence of infections in the donor pool over time, testing will have evolved and that some infections may be associated with decreased organ utilization. We will analyze all available results from actual and potential organ donors from 1989-2025. It will be a clinical research project involving retrospective data which has already been obtained, with existing ethics approval. The project will involve analyzing and interpreting this data. There is no laboratory component. Previous experience using R is desirable but not essential.