Tolerating Hepatitis

Abstract

The report of Chatterjee et al. on pages 62–65 not only confirms that hepatitis B is generally well tolerated by renal-transplant recipients but also indicates that the infection does not prejudice survival of the transplanted kidney. Even before they receive pharmacologic agents designed to enhance immunologic tolerance of the allograft, candidates maintained on chronic dialysis give evidence of depressed cellular immune responsiveness. The altered immune status has been invoked as an explanation for the propensity of hepatitis B infections to be relatively mild and to evolve into chronic carriage of hepatitis B surface antigen (HB_s Ag) in the serum. . . .