AIDS RISK FROM DOCTORS REMOTE

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

DATE: WEDNESDAY, April 14, 1993                   TAG: 9304140162
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-10   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: CHICAGO                                LENGTH: Medium
AIDS RISK FROM DOCTORS REMOTE
Fresh research supports previous conclusions by AIDS experts that the chance of contracting the deadly virus from infected doctors or dentists is extremely remote.
More than 2,500 patients were treated by two AIDS-infected surgeons and a dentist without catching the virus from them, according to studies appearing in today's issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association.
A preventive medicine expert who did not participate in the research said the studies were reassuring, but argued they should have looked at people with the AIDS virus whose infections couldn't be traced to other sources.
"If you are aggressively looking for transmission, you have to start from the other side," said Dr. William Schaffner, chairman of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville.
He cited the case of Kimberly Bergalis, the late Florida woman whose infection is blamed on her dentist, who also died of AIDS.
The infections of Bergalis and four other HIV-positive patients of the same dentist are the only known cases of doctor-to-patient AIDS transmission, Schaffner said in an accompanying editorial.
The studies were done by separate teams in New Hampshire, Maryland and Florida. Each started with an infected doctor or dentist and tested all patients willing to participate.
In New Hampshire, researchers tested 1,174 patients who had undergone invasive procedures by an AIDS-infected orthopedic surgeon.
In Maryland, 413 of 1,131 patients operated on by a breast surgery specialist at Johns Hopkins Hospital were tested.
In the Florida study, 900 of 1,192 dental patients were tested.
"This study indicates that the risk for transmission of HIV from a general dentist to his patients is minimal in a setting in which universal precautions are strictly observed," said the Florida researchers, led by Dr. Gordon M. Dickinson of the University of Miami School of Medicine.
The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recorded 903 cases of AIDS among physicians and 243 cases among dentists and other dental workers through September 199

by Bhavesh Jinadra by CNB