Word: cdc
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...people in the U.S. who have not heard about or witnessed on television the suffering of Kimberly Bergalis -- the 23- year-old Floridian who contracted AIDS from her dentist. Her anguished letters and poignant testimony before Congress have sparked a nationwide campaign, endorsed by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), to test health- care workers for HIV and inform their patients if they are infected...
...most respects, the state's proposed policy matches that set forth last summer by the CDC. Both urge health-care workers to undergo voluntary HIV tests. Both recommend setting up expert panels to determine, on a case-by-case basis, whether infected health-care workers should continue practicing medicine and what procedures they may safely perform. Where the feds and state part company is over the issue of informing patients about their doctor's health status. Under CDC guidelines, an infected health professional may continue to perform invasive procedures, such as cardiac or abdominal surgery, if he or she informs...
Soon after that policy was announced, the U.S. Senate moved aggressively beyond the CDC and passed two measures to make the agency's recommendations, including disclosure, mandatory. Under one proposal, sponsored by Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, physicians could receive prison terms of 10 years and fines of up to $10,000 if they refused to reveal their HIV infection before an operation -- whether or not they passed on the virus to their patients. The second bill, backed by Senators Robert Dole of Kansas and Orrin Hatch of Utah, threatens any state that does not implement the CDC guidelines...
...fact, medical workers are more vulnerable to being infected by patients than vice versa. The CDC has documented 40 such cases -- most of them involving accidents with hypodermic needles that contained contaminated blood. "Because there is mass hysteria, and because this is a fatal disease, and because people don't know very much about this, people's common-sense reaction, including Senators', is to act first and think later," says Geri Palast, a lobbyist for the Service Employees International Union, which represents 350,000 health-care workers...
...everything is infected with something -- whether it be Staphylococcus bacteria, tetanus toxins or the AIDS virus. That is why instruments should be sterilized in an autoclave, physicians should change gloves or wash hands between patients, and disposable swabs, syringes and other items should not be reused. Although the CDC's disease detectives are still not sure what went wrong in Acer's office, they are zeroing in on just such a breach in infection control...