AMA Urges Tracing of Sex Partners in War on AIDS

The American Medical Assn. today called on the states to trace the sexual partners of people infected with the AIDS virus and urged prisons to test inmates for exposure to the deadly disease.

The AMA approved both measures by voice vote along with a package of other AIDS proposals before adjourning its annual policy-making convention.

“I think that contact tracing (of sexual partners), at least in the heterosexual community, has the potential to substantially reduce the proliferation and spread of AIDS,” said Dr. James Sammons, executive vice president of the 295,000-member AMA.

The AMA’s 420-member House of Delegates also approved policies aimed at prohibiting athletes from using steroids, posting health warnings on tanning booths, urging airlines to ban smoking on all domestic flights and evaluating whether health warnings should be required on alcoholic beverages.

Need for Confidentiality

Dr. Don Chaplin, a delegate from Burlington, N.C., warned that doctors must emphasize the need to protect the identities of AIDS victims.

“I caution us to be very careful to do anything we can to protect confidentiality and to fight any discrimination because it would thwart our efforts to bring this disease under control,” Chaplin said.

The doctors approved the resolution urging what Chaplin said would be “broad expansions on contact tracing” of sexual partners to slow the spread of AIDS among heterosexuals.

Sammons said contact tracing had been effective in reducing such other sexually transmitted diseases as syphilis and gonorrhea.

Testing in Prisons

The doctors’ organization renewed its call for mandatory AIDS-virus testing of all inmates because of the problems of intravenous drug use and homosexuality in prisons, practices that spread the disease.

The AMA adopted a similar prison-testing proposal last year and reapproved it today despite objections from several doctors that it would accomplish little.