Let the AIDS-Infected Health-Care Workers Treat Other AIDS Victims

After reading the article about Dr. Don Hagan (“A Doctor’s Struggle With AIDS,” Sept. 17), the Laguna Beach doctor who announced he was leaving his practice because he was infected with the AIDS virus, here’s an option that professionals like him can exercise early on, instead of waiting 19 months.

How about enabling these health-care professionals to confine their practice to the care and treatment of AIDS-infected patients? There are plenty of people, for example, in Laguna Beach who are at risk, have been diagnosed with the infection or who are dying of AIDS. In addition, putting AIDS-infected health-care workers with AIDS patients would help us curb the spread, or, at least, alleviate the concerns of people who believe that infection is spread through mere contact.

This option would enable AIDS victims to receive treatment and care from compassionate, qualified professionals who would understand the trauma of the infection.

Where loss of income is a factor, how about offering to subsidize infected health-care workers using funds currently being raised by AIDS foundations and other groups around the world? To ensure no loss of income, we might use the doctor’s “best three-year income average” as a basis for figuring the subsidy amount; and ask the insurance industry to offer an insurance arrangement in keeping with the policy the doctor/health-care worker enjoyed before being diagnosed.

We must find viable and worthwhile incentives that will cause those who know they are infected to voluntarily separate themselves from the non-infected community as early as the infected person knows, and without the hardships, stigma, and guilt they apparently now endure.

MARY E. MARTIN, Laguna Niguel