Miami Herald (MH) - Friday August 16, 1991
Elinor Burkett; Herald Staff Writer

Now, capitalizing on that mood with the entrepreneurial principle that one man's panic is another man's profit, a Tallahassee businessman has created the National Free of AIDS Identification Service, which purports to certify healthcare professionals as noninfectious.

The service's certificates are filled with disclaimers -- including one that explains the document does not certify that a doctor or dentist is "AIDS free." But that hasn't kept the phone in the Tallahassee office from ringing with calls from New York, West Palm Beach, Washington and Miami, says Rod Harris, the company's president.

"I was trying to keep this a secret until we were really ready to go public," he says. "But word is getting out. It's clear there is a demand."

The demand is for reassurance, no matter how illusory, that you can protect yourself 100 percent against the virus believed to cause AIDS. In the wake of the illness of Kimberly Bergalis and four other Floridians infected with the human immunodeficiency virus in the dental office of Dr. David Acer, it has become the 1990s version of the '80s AIDS panic that led Indianans to bar Ryan White from school and Floridians to burn down the home of the Ray family.

Working dentists and physicians known to have tested positive for HIV make headline news. Thousands of their patients rush to testing centers. Television stations interview grade-school children about their new reason for avoiding the dentist's chair. Politicians have jumped on the bandwagon, even suggesting that HIV-positive health care workers be jailed if they refuse to make their condition known.

Public health authorities insist the chance of being infected by an HIV-positive dentist is less than the chance of being killed in a car en route to a dental office. Hundreds of thousands of Americans have been screened for the virus, they point out; Acer's are the only patients of an HIV-positive healthcare worker to have been infected in a medical setting. Lack of attention to sterilization and other infection-control measures are the real dangers in a physician's office, the Centers for Disease Control has said repeatedly.

But the least likely route of infection with the AIDS virus has still become the nation's obsession. Health care professionals are running for cover with newspaper ads publicly announcing themselves free of HIV. Dentists are sending letters to their patients declaring themselves good family men.

Firefighters in Arvada, Colo., are refusing to make emergency calls to the homes of HIV-infected people. Police in Tennessee have even arrested a woman who called an ambulance when her fiance suffered a heart attack and didn't tell his rescuers that he was infected with the virus.

"I've been following the AIDS controversy from the business standpoint for a long time," Harris says. "Now is the optimal time to get something like this started."

His National Free of AIDS Identification Service arranges for testing of health care workers, provides certificates of noninfection to those whose blood tests show no traces of the virus and offers that information to the public.

"We're providing two things: a picture ID and a certificate of testing," Harris says. "We offer no assurances someone does not have the AIDS virus. This is not a guarantee."

Harris cannot offer a guarantee because the HIV test isolates antibodies to the virus rather than the virus itself. A person can be infected with the virus for months, even years, before those antibodies are produced.

Because of this "window" period, many public officials worry that any certification of being "AIDS free" is dangerously misleading. That's the basis of recent action by the San Francisco district attorney against two Oakland, Calif., dentists who bought an ad in the San Francisco Chronicle in June offering patients "peace of mind" because they had tested HIV negative.

"Such a claim ignores the fact that the HIV infection does not register on the currently available HIV tests until a minimum of six to eight weeks after the date of infection," wrote Arlo Smith, advising the dentists to stop running their ad. "We believe that this claim has the capacity to mislead members of the public."

In Florida, the Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services is aware of similar attempts by local health care professionals to allay the concerns of their patients. Dr. Mark Morton of Tallahassee, for example, recently sent a letter to his patients informing them that he was tested on July 16 and proved to be negative. He did not explain the limitations of the test, but he did note that he is married and has two children.

HRS has no plans to take action against him or against Harris, says Stephen Kindland, spokesperson for the agency. "We haven't put Harris' business to any legal test at this point. We really don't intend to."
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Always watch for outdated information. This article first appeared in 1991. This material is designed to support, not replace, the relationship that exists between you and your doctor.

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