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A living donor program has been suspended by the most prominent hospital of the country after a donor died last month following a kidney donation. The donor gave his kidney to a recipient at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center in October. The officials and the hospital are still analyzing the cause of death, reported San Francisco Chronical. Dr. Steven Katznelson, medical director of California Pacific Medical Center's kidney transplantation program in San Francisco, said that the donor's death was a "nightmare scenario." "We worry about it every day," he said. "For a healthy person who goes under general anesthesia, there's always a risk." UCSF confirmed that the recipient's new kidney is working fine and refused or discuss the donor's death or his identity further.

Although, most kidney transplants receive their kidneys from a deceased donor, but the ones who receive it from a living donor get better results. The risk of kidney donor's death after a surgery is about 3 deaths per 10,000 cases. Including the UCSF case, there have be 4 kidney donor deaths reported since 2014, as per the Organ Procurement and Transplant Network. Officials from the hospital say that UCSF doctors are well experienced with kidney transplants and have performed more surgeries than any other hospital in the country. They have performed a total of 10,000 surgeries since 1964, 350 kidney transplants each year out of which 150 involve donors that are alive. UCSF said that while the investigation is on, they will not conduct kidney transplant on donors but will continue transplanting the kidneys from living or deceased donors into the patients. "Our goal is to help (UCSF and its patients) as much as we can," Katznelson said, as reported by Star Tribune.