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Why Fear Persists: Health Care Professionals and AIDS
Barbara Gerbert, PhD;
Bryan Maguire;
Victor Badner, DMD;
David Altman, MD;
George Stone, PhD
JAMA. 1988;260(23):3481-3483.
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ACQUIRED immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) is a frightening disease. Recent studies of dental professionals, physicians, and nurses have documented that fear is a basic and persistent reaction to the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) epidemic. We have found, for example, that among a sample of dental providers in California, 81% of dentists and dental hygienists and 86% of dental assistants believed they would be at increased risk for infection if they treated people with AIDS.1,2 Physicians who worry about AIDS have reported increased stress. In one study, 40% of medical house officers and 24% of pediatric house officers said their levels of stress had risen either moderately or extremely because they were concerned about getting AIDS.3 More than half of the nurses in one study (59%) believed that AIDS could be transmitted to hospital personnel despite infection control precautions.4 These studies and others show that getting AIDS from a
. . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]
Author Affiliations
From the Departments of Dental Public Health and Hygiene (Drs Gerbert and Badner and Mr Maguire) and Medicine (Dr Altman), and Program in Health Psychology (Mr Maguire and Dr Stone), University of California, San Francisco. Dr Badner is now with the Department of Dentistry, Albert Einstein School of Medicine, New York.
Footnotes
Reprint requests to Division of Behavioral Sciences, University of California at San Francisco, San Francisco, CA 94143-0754 (Dr Gerbert).
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