Routine Preoperative Screening for HIV
- Joseph S. Carey, MD
Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text.
Excerpt
To the Editor.— I wish to take issue with the SPECIAL COMMUNICATION entitled "Routine Preoperative Screening for HIV: Does the Risk to the Surgeon Outweigh the Risk to the Patient?"1 The authors, three nonsurgeons, make a number of assumptions, such as a "first-order approximation" of the rate of skin penetration from intraoperative injuries to the surgeon's hands of 2%. The reverse calculation of skin-puncture rate from seroconversion to hepatitis B virus among surgeons is farfetched and not particularly pertinent. More pertinent would be an attempt to estimate the highest possible risk. Such data are critical to those of us who are exposed.
The skin-puncture rate could be assumed to be equal to the glove-puncture rate, since multiple punctures may occur during the same procedure and frequent glove changes are common. If the glove-puncture rate is 25% and the risk of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection after skin puncture is
Footnotes
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Edited by Jody W. Zylke, MD, Contributing Editor; Sharon Iverson, Assistant editor.
