Word: dentist
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MEDICINE Should you worry about your dentist having AIDS...
...content to wait for federal action, the Illinois legislature overwhelmingly passed a new law last week that would authorize the state's health department to notify patients when their medical-care providers are diagnosed with AIDS. The bill was prompted by the revelation that the only dentist in the town of Nokomis, Ill. (pop. 2,700), died of AIDS last October; his patients were not notified until early this month, after a state legislator threatened to make the circumstances of the dentist's death public...
...whom he had operated that they may have been exposed to the virus. So far, none of them have tested positive, and all the lawsuits filed against his estate have been dismissed. Delaware health officials have offered free HIV tests to more than 1,200 patients of a Wilmington dentist who died of AIDS in March. Of the 600 who have taken the state up on its offer, none have tested positive...
...danger is not from the doctor but from slipshod practices, says Jack Rosenberg, a Manhattan dentist and founder of a gay and lesbian dental guild. "Asking your dentist whether or not he is gay is not going to protect you," Rosenberg says. "Instead, you should ask, 'Do you sterilize your instruments? Do you follow standard infection control?' Those are the questions that will protect you." Rosenberg caused a ruckus last week when he publicly declared that he knew several dentists who are HIV-positive and that he advises them not to tell their patients...
Knowing the HIV status of a surgeon or dentist should not necessarily reassure a patient. "These are people who are exposed to patients every day," says Dr. Michael Callahan, chairman of an AIDS task force for the American College of Emergency Physicians. Yet it can take a person six months after infection to make enough antibodies against HIV to test positive. Says Callahan: "If I got tested yesterday and was negative, I might get exposed to HIV tomorrow." In addition, the danger of bad sterilization practices is that the virus passes from one patient to the next, rather than from...