Word: tested
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Safety is usually the cited reason for setting apart those who test positive. Job Corps Director Peter Rell explains that his agency's exclusionary policy is meant to secure "as healthy and disease-free an environment as possible." All 36,000 participants in the agency's residential programs are warned of the test on enrollment forms, he says, and are provided with counseling if they are rejected because of the results. The high costs of treating AIDS patients is an actuarial problem for insurers, who routinely reject seropositives seeking life or medical coverage. "Once we sign on, we're there...
Victims of these practices counter that testing positive does not necessarily mean a person will develop AIDS. Nor does the presence of carriers, or even those who have come down with AIDS, endanger the workplace, critics insist, because medical evidence indicates that the virus cannot be transmitted by casual contact. Discrimination on the basis of the blood tests may actually harm public health, they warn. "If you fear you are going to lose your job and just about everything else in your life," says Katherine Franke of the New York City Human Rights Commission, "there is no incentive to take...
...starting to bend in favor of those who have been singled out by the tests. Forty-two states and the District of Columbia have antidiscrimination laws against the handicapped; some state courts and executive actions have extended the protections of these statutes to people branded by their blood-test results. Delaware's attorney general recently forced the Nemours Foundation to drop its policy of transferring out seropositive patients from its Wilmington hospital. Municipalities have also been using their antidiscrimination ordinances. In New York City last March, an administrative judge awarded $26,647 to a man who was refused treatment...
...Test victims are also getting help from the federal courts. Although last year one federal bench rejected a Fourth Amendment challenge to a State Department employee-testing policy, in March another decided that the < mandatory testing of workers by a Nebraska health agency violates the amendment's ban on unreasonable searches. In June a federal district court in Los Angeles produced a major victory for foes of AIDS tracing in addressing the claim of a gay man who was tossed out of an alcohol rehabilitation program at Centinela Hospital in Inglewood, Calif. Judge Pamela Ann Rymer ruled that a person...
Predictably, such legal developments have encouraged a backlash. One of the most volatile battles is now raging in California. The state's stringent confidentiality law is being challenged by a proposition on the November ballot. It would require that public-health officials be informed of all positive AIDS tests and that all sexual partners of those who test positive be traced and alerted. The measure's chief proponent, Republican Congressman William Dannemeyer, says he wants to correct the state's "absurd policy" of turning a "public-health issue into a civil rights issue." But Benjamin Schatz, a lawyer with National...