Aids Tests Are Useful Safeguard

September 16, 1991

The reaction from the medical establishment to a Senate-passed bill requiring health-care providers with HIV to notify their patients included a dogmatic assertion that the risk of getting AIDS from medical personnel is minimal.

Somehow, that encouraging claim does not jibe with information provided by the Centers for Disease Control about the problems hospitals have preventing the spread of diseases. That information: An estimated 20,000 Americans die each year as a result of hospital-acquired infections, and another 60,000 deaths are indirectly linked to such infections.

OK, translated out of Washington gobbledygook, the message is that the risk of HIV infection is practically non-existent, even though other infections are another matter. Sorry, it doesn't compute, since hospitals go to great length to prevent any kind of infections, but obviously fail. It's the old gap between theory and practice.

Clearly, Congress needs to require extra precautions for health-care workers. What's needed is a law that makes the continued flow of federal health dollars contingent on states requiring health-care workers who do invasive procedures to be tested for AIDS.

Doctors, dentists and nurses who test positive for AIDS or the HIV virus should be made to refrain from work that involves invasive procedures or made to first warn their patients of their condition.

Testing all hospital patients for AIDS, in the meantime, would provide better protection for health-care workers. Increased testing could lead to a better understanding of the AIDS crisis and perhaps even how other infectious diseases are spread.

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