Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1984. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
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Wall Street Journal - December 13,1984
The announcement follows reports that a laboratory technician in Boston contracted AIDS, possibly from a needle prick some months ago. Researchers are trying to determine whether the worker, whose name has been withheld, got the disease from an AIDS patient. If so, it would be the first documented case of a health-care worker catching the disease from a patient.
The worker is under intensive care at New England Medical Center and is listed in poor condition.
Martin S. Hirsch, a doctor with Massachusetts General Hospital's infectious disease unit and chief researcher for the study, said in a news conference that he took the unusual step of announcing its results before they are published because of the "excitement" generated by the case of the laboratory technician.
The study's results are scheduled to appear in the Jan. 3 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, which permitted Dr. Hirsch to talk publicly about the study before publication.
Since AIDS was identified in 1981, about 7,000 cases of the disease have been reported nationwide. The disease disables its victims' immune systems and is usually fatal within three years of contraction. Dr. Hirsch said the first case of AIDS at a hospital often causes "panic" among health-care workers, who sometimes have refused to work with AIDS patients. He said the study "seems to confirm that ... current precautions taken in hospitals are effective in protecting employees" who work with AIDS patients.
Dr. Hirsch said the study involved 85 health-care workers exposed to AIDS patients for between one and three years at Massachusetts General Hospital and Westchester County Medical Center in New York. He said those surveyed included 30 who accidentally pricked themselves with needles while taking blood from AIDS patients and one worker whose eyes were accidentally splashed with blood from an AIDS patient.
None of the workers showed symptoms of AIDS or developed antibodies to the virus believed to cause the disease, he said. "Assuming AIDS acts like other viruses," he added, the workers should have developed antibodies to the virus during the time of the study if they had contracted the disease.
Dr. Hirsch said AIDS appears to be spread in a way similar to hepatitis B, a viral infection transmitted through sexual intercourse and blood transfusions. But he said transmission of the virus believed to cause AIDS is "much less common" than of the hepatitis virus.
Dr. Hirsch said the study doesn't indicate that the workers can't get AIDS from patients or that hospital precautions against transmission of the disease should be relaxed. "But health-care workers should be somewhat reassured by this study and by others like it whose results are coming along," he said.
About 230 health-care workers in the U. S. have contracted AIDS, Harold Jaffe, a researcher at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, said. However, all but 23 of the workers belonged to four high-risk groups for the disease: homosexual males, intravenous drug abusers, Haitian immigrants and hemophiliacs. The probable source of the disease for the 23 workers who aren't in the high-risk groups hasn't been explained, he said.
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