Should an HIV-Positive Surgeon Tell? FINAL Edition

• Published in: The Sun (Baltimore, Md. : 1837)
• Main Author: DAVID WHEELER, KAREN ROTHENBERG and DEBRA WEIMER
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: Baltimore, Md Tribune Publishing Company, LLC 15.06.1993
• ISSN: 1930-8965

When we look at the implications of compelling disclosure, the costs and dangers become apparent. HIV-positive health-care workers who pose no significant risk to their patients will be stripped of their work and become drains on the health system, instead of contributing to it. (An HIV-positive person may have up to 10 years of productive work before developing AIDS). Other health-care workers will become more fearful of working in inner-city hospitals where they inescapably will come into contact with large numbers of HIV-positive patients. It is much more likely that HIV will be transmitted from patient to health-care worker than the other way around. May health-care workers demand to know the HIV status of patients? The cost of testing all health-care workers and patients would be astronomical. Discrimination against HIV-positive patients is very likely to increase. The Court of Appeals leaves us with many questions. Do all health-care workers, or only surgeons, have an obligation to disclose their HIV status? Should all health-care workers be tested for HIV? How often? Even daily testing will not be fool-proof, since a person can be infectious for 2-6 weeks before showing a positive test result. Even if a surgeon were tested before every operation, the patient's risk for being exposed to HIV would still not be zero.