Officials Agree to Disease Disclosure Plan for Jail Inmates

County health officials have agreed on a policy where jail deputies--but not all jail employees--will be told about inmates with AIDS, county public health officer L. Rex Ehling said Thursday.

The plan, worked out in meetings with officials from the Sheriff’s Department and five other agencies, balances inmates’ confidentiality rights with officers’ right to know an inmate’s infectious status, as provided in the 1988 initiative, Proposition 96, Ehling said.

Under the plan, jail deputies will be told which prisoners have acquired immune deficiency syndrome, hepatitis or other infectious diseases, said county AIDS coordinator Penny Weismuller, but some categories of employees--such as jail clerks or volunteer chaplains--will not learn that information routinely.

“What we have agreed to is that information will be provided to people who have exposure to blood and body fluids--but not the entire jail,” she said, explaining that jail deputies occasionally have to break up fights.

With the general categories defined on who needs to know infectious status, health officials expect to resume a voluntary AIDS test program for inmates in a week or two.

The program, begun in 1985, was suspended in December because of questions about how widely results should be circulated at the jail. All that remains now, Ehling said, is to approve final language on a consent form for prisoners who wish to be tested.

Meanwhile, Sheriff’s Lt. Richard J. Olson said talk of a plan for notifying jail deputies about prisoner diseases is “premature. . . . We haven’t seen any communications” from Ehling yet.

Ehling disputed that, however, noting that leaders from an interagency panel, including officials from the sheriff’s office, “were in agreement with it” at a meeting Wednesday.

He noted, however, that the sheriff still needs to develop a specific procedure of his own, defining precisely which employees would learn an inmate’s infectious status.

On Thursday, Ehling mailed copies of “implementation recommendations” to officials of the Sheriff’s Department; marshals, fire, police and probation officials; the district attorney’s and county counsel’s offices; Superior and Municipal Court judges, and the county’s Victim-Witness program. Representatives of most of these agencies have taken part in the panel’s meetings.

Proposition 96 allows sex-crime victims and public-service personnel, mainly police officers and paramedics, to get a court order to learn whether they have been exposed to AIDS or another communicable disease.

Under Ehling’s plan, he will try to persuade an inmate whose body fluids touch a county worker to be tested voluntarily for AIDS. If that person refuses, Ehling will seek a court order for testing.

The plan directs county workers who are exposed to prisoners’ blood or body fluids, aside from saliva, to report the exposure to Ehling. Also, if a law enforcement officer sees activities that “could result in the transmission of AIDS” in a jail or juvenile facility--such as sexual activity, intravenous drug use or “tattooing among inmates”--he is supposed to report this to superiors and to Ehling.

“In the case of the Sheriff’s Department, frequently they’ll be frisking someone and stick themselves with a needle,” Ehling said. “They need to know know what to do.”

At the same time, he is committed to preserving the confidentiality of an inmate’s infectious status. When Proposition 96 passed in November, “there was a big hue and cry, and the head of the (state) Department of Corrections said, ‘Confidentiality is out the window,’ ” Ehling noted.

He and his staff looked into hospital coding systems that protect information. “We will have some kind of coding” on inmates’ charts about their infectious status, Ehling vowed.

“Everybody will not have access,” he said. “We will have some kind of protection.”