Human Herpesvirus 8-Associated Diseases in Solid-Organ Transplantation: Importance of Viral Transmission from the Donor

Abstract
Sir—We read with great interest the article by Avery [1], and we appreciated the note regarding human herpesvirus 8 (HHV-8) infection, but we would like to emphasize the issue of transmission of HHV-8 with grafts. HHV-8 infection has been recognized to be causally associated with the development of posttransplantation Kaposi sarcoma (KS), which mainly affects renal and liver transplant recipients [2–17], with incidences of 0.5%–5.3% [18]. So far, 7 cases of HHV-8-associated lymphoproliferations have been described in recipients of solid-organ transplants [2, 12, 13, 19–21].