AEGiS-Miami Herald: EDITORIAL: AIDS and Work

Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1985. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.

EDITORIAL: AIDS and Work

Miami Herald - Wednesday, June 26, 1985
Herald Staff

THE CITY of Hollywood is hunting witches with a blood test. The city now will give job applicants a blood test for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) although that test is inaccurate and there is no medical evidence that AIDS can be transmitted by at-work contacts. The Hollywood issue shows a clear need for fashioning public policy through debate, not through small administrative actions that become policy through accretion. Last week, without discussion, the Hollywood City Commission voted to hire a medical group to give job applicants pre-employment physicals. The commission was unaware that the city administration had included in the contract a blood test for antibodies to the HTLV-III virus. The presence of those antibodies indicates possible exposure to a virus related to AIDS. The problem here is that exposure to the virus is not tantamount to a diagnosis of AIDS. In fact, although more than one million Americans tested showed a positive reaction, an oncologist at the University of Texas says only 10 percent will get AIDS.

City Personnel Director Herbert Chernov defends the test as protection for other employees. The flaw in his argument is that medical researchers say that AIDS is transmitted by body fluids through sexual contact or blood transfusion from an infected person, hardly part of the typical job.

Mr. Chernov also argues that the tests will protect the city's benefits package -- and here he is on firmer ground. No employer offering health insurance, disability benefits, and sick leaves wants to hire a chronically ill person. The typical AIDS patient's treatment costs $100,000.

But is it fair to deny a job to a person who carries its antibodies but not AIDS? If the city of Hollywood or any other employer is going to use this test as a preliminary screening device, it then must guarantee free, more-comprehensive testing to any job applicant who tests positive in the screening. If there is to be rejection in the workplace, it must rest on fact, not on suspicion.

AIDS is indeed a fearsome disease because it is incurable and eventually fatal. But that fear cannot be permitted to translate itself into wholesale exclusions of persons who have had some contact at some time with the virus but who are not contagious. The Hollywood commission should revisit its decision on these tests and set a policy that protects both its present and future employees.

Keywords: health; test; employee; brwrd
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