AIDS Victim Backs Bill for Testing Health Professionals : Disease: The woman, who apparently was infected by her dentist, urges lawmakers to act to protect other patients and those who provide care.

Kimberly Bergalis, the 23-year-old Florida woman who apparently contracted AIDS from her dentist, made a dramatic appeal to Congress on Thursday, urging lawmakers to act “so that no other patient or health care provider will have to go through the hell that I have.”

Bergalis, her once-beautiful features shrunken and wasted by the final stages of the disease, entered the hearing room in a wheelchair and spoke with obvious extreme effort in a soft, slightly slurred voice devoid of emotion. Her entire testimony lasted barely 20 seconds.

“I’d like to say that AIDS is a terrible disease that you must take seriously,” she said. “I did nothing wrong, yet I’m being made to suffer like this. My life has been taken away. Please enact legislation so that no other patient or health care provider will have to go through the hell that I have.”

She was accompanied by her parents as she appeared before members of the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on health to support a bill--named after her--sponsored by Rep. William E. Dannemeyer (R-Fullerton) that would require mandatory AIDS testing of health care professionals who perform certain invasive procedures and would prohibit them from performing surgery if they are infected with the human immunodeficiency virus.

The Senate has already approved tougher legislation, sponsored by Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), that would impose criminal penalties on infected health care workers who continue to practice.

The legislation is opposed by numerous public health officials, medical groups and AIDS organizations, who instead favor voluntary testing, arguing that the risk of transmission is extremely remote and that a greater emphasis should be placed on infection control procedures. The federal Centers for Disease Control has recommended that surgeons and others voluntarily undergo testing and abstain from invasive surgical procedures if they are infected.

The White House said Thursday that President Bush also opposes the measure, preferring the voluntary approach.

Surrounded by a crowd of cameras and reporters, a clearly weak Bergalis--who traveled 20 hours by train to appear on Capitol Hill--left the room shortly after testifying. But her father, George, a Ft. Pierce, Fla., finance official, continued to vent the anger that she no longer has the strength to express.

“Kimberly is America’s shame,” he said. “Kimberly is your shame also, all of Congress’ shame because of the fact she is the result of your unwillingness or inability to deal with this monster that you’ve created . . . . Kimberly is the result of 10 years of protection of covert action, of unwillingness to address the real issue. . . .

“It’s time for Congress to get off their duff and to say for 10 years we have treated this issue not as a disease, but as a civil rights issue, as a protection of privacy issue, as anything other than a disease . . . . Why is AIDS deserving of special treatment?”

Dannemeyer, ranking Republican on the panel, said the legislation was designed to ensure that, “when we as patients go to our health care practitioners, we are not going to get a fatal disease.”

But Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles), who is chairman of the subcommittee and opposes the bill, said that “we should provide protection that is real and not just a feeling of protection.”

Bergalis apparently was infected by her dentist in 1987 during the routine extraction of two molars. The dentist, Dr. David Acer, died of the disease last year. Since then, four more of Acer’s patients have been found to be infected with the same strain of the virus.

Public health officials have never determined exactly how the transmission occurred but have focused their investigation on contaminated dental equipment. They are also considering the possibility that Acer might have deliberately infected his patients.

The Acer case is the only known instance of a health care provider apparently infecting his patients.

Barbara C. Webb, of Palm City, Fla., another of Acer’s patients believed to have been infected by him, appeared with Bergalis and agreed that mandatory testing is necessary. “Volunteerism and universal precautions . . . are insufficient,” she said.

Bergalis, who has become the ultimate symbol of the AIDS “innocent” victim, has evoked a pained response from the AIDS community, which has been reluctant to either publicly attack her or embrace her.

“I appreciate and share your anger, Kimberly,” said David Barr, assistant policy director of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis in New York, who is also infected with HIV and who testified before the subcommittee.

“I too am very angry,” Barr said. “I, like you, am angry that I have this virus and that there is nothing I can do to alter the fact that I am infected. Like you, I feel that I do not deserve this fate . . . . I never asked for this, and neither did the over 115,000 Americans who have already died. We are all innocent victims here. Yet, my anger seems focused in different directions than yours.”

Barr said his anger was directed at federal policies that he said have resulted in inadequate funding for research, life-saving drugs and “disaster relief” for cities hard-hit by the epidemic.

“Here we are together at this circus being pitted against each other,” he said. “We are not enemies, even though we are presented as such. We are dying from the same neglect.”

Several other AIDS patients spoke against the Dannemeyer measure. They included a nurse who was one of the first documented cases of infection through occupational exposure, and an 18-year-old hemophiliac who became infected from the use of a contaminated blood protein needed for clotting.

The legislation “will not prevent one single infection in the health care setting,” said Barbara Fassbinder, a 37-year-old nurse from Monona, Iowa, who was infected in 1986 while working on an emergency room patient.

Fassbinder, who called for more emphasis on infection control procedures, said she became infected when the patient’s blood entered her bloodstream through cuts on her finger she received while gardening.

Had infection control procedures been emphasized at the time, “I would have worn gloves,” she said. “It’s such a simple thing. The gloves would have made all the difference.”