A patient in Maryland has died of rabies contracted from a kidney transplant, and three other people who received organs from the same donor were being treated to prevent the disease, health officials said Friday.

The patient’s sex and date of death were not disclosed.

Doctors did not know or even suspect that the organ donor had rabies, so he was not tested for the virus that causes it before his heart, liver and kidneys were removed for transplantation.

This was the second time in the United States that transplanted organs have spread rabies, said Dr. Matthew J. Kuehnert, the director of the Office of Blood, Organ, and Other Tissue Safety at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The first was in 2004, when three people who received organs from one donor died of the disease. A fourth recipient died, but so soon after surgery that the death was not thought to be a result of rabies. In addition, in 1979 a patient was infected with rabies by a corneal transplant.

Infections of any type spread by transplanted organs are uncommon. Fewer than 1 percent of deceased donors are found to have infected recipients, says the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network, which oversees transplants nationwide. But when infections occur, they can be deadly, because drugs used to prevent patients from rejecting transplants work by suppressing the immune system — leaving them vulnerable to infection.