Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, April 5, 1991                   TAG: 9104050249
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

HIV DOCTORS' GUIDELINES PROPOSED

The draft of a proposal to prevent patients from being infected with the virus is less restrictive than earlier recommendations from the American Medical Association, the American Dental Association, and the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgery, which called for infected health-care professionals to stop performing surgery or to inform their patients of their infection.

The draft, which has not been made public, says doctors and dentists should heed a professional responsibility to test themselves for the human immunodeficiency virus, which causes AIDS.

The draft calls on medical, surgical and dental groups to identify the operations and invasive procedures most likely to expose a patient to the tiny risk of becoming infected with the HIV virus from an infected health-care professional.

The draft would need to be approved by secretary of health and human services Dr. Louis Sullivan before being released for public comment. Any guidelines that are approved would not be binding. But they could become the basis of a malpractice suit if a patient became infected through a procedure performed by a doctor who did not follow recommendations.

In allowing local flexibility, the CDC seems to be taking into account differences in the rate of AIDS infections throughout the country and responding to the views expressed at a forum that it called in February after epidemiologists found that a Florida dentist had probably transmitted the AIDS virus to three of his patients.