Needle Jab Gives French Nurse AIDS Virus
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BOSTON — Another case of a hospital worker’s being infected with the AIDS virus by an accidental needle jab has been reported by French doctors.
The infection occurred in a nurse who received a superficial needle-stick injury in her finger when she recapped a needle that had been used to withdraw fluid from a patient with AIDS symptoms. Acquired immune deficiency syndrome is an incurable disease that destroys the body’s ability to fight infections.
The accident was described by Dr. Eric Oksenhendler and colleagues from Saint-Louis Hospital in Paris in a letter in today’s issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
Last April, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control investigated 983 accidental exposures of health care workers to blood and other body fluids from AIDS patients. They found that two of them went on to develop AIDS virus infections, but only one clearly got it from a hospital accident.
In the French case, the nurse developed antibodies to the AIDS virus about two months after the accident. However, she has not gotten AIDS and her husband remains free of the infection.
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