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- <text id=93TT1526>
- <title>
- Apr. 26, 1993: AIDS from an M.D.?
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1993
- Apr. 26, 1993 The Truth about Dinosaurs
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- THE WEEK, Page 17
- HEALTH & SCIENCE
- AIDS from an M.D.?
- </hdr>
- <body>
- <p>Not likely, say three studies of HIV-positive doctors and their
- patients
- </p>
- <p> Even after the death of Kimberly Bergalis--the young
- Florida woman whose AIDS infection was blamed on her dentist--doctors insisted that they are far more likely to get the AIDS
- virus from a patient than the other way around. Three new studies
- published in the Journal of the American Medical Association
- seem to prove them right. Researchers identified three
- HIV-positive doctors--two surgeons and a dentist--who
- continued to practice almost until their death. Then the
- researchers tested patients--more than 2,500 people--who had
- undergone invasive procedures while the doctors were
- HIV-positive. Some of those patients had the AIDS virus, but
- none of them got it from their doctor.
- </p>
- <p> An accompanying J.A.M.A. editorial found the studies
- reassuring but argued that it would be more convincing to start
- from the other end: to find one patient who got aids from a
- physician and then to test the doctor's other patients. That is
- not easy to do. Of all the doctors with AIDS, the only one who
- has been linked to infections in his patients is Kimberly
- Bergalis' dentist.
- </p>
-
- </body>
- </article>
- </text>
-
-