Holden Urges AIDS Tests for Restaurant Workers : Health: Proposal for semiannual checkups draws fire from medical experts, fellow council members.

In a heavily criticized move, City Councilman Nate Holden on Friday proposed a law requiring restaurant waiters, waitresses, busboys and cooks in Los Angeles to be tested for the AIDS virus every six months.

In filing his motion with the City Council, Holden said such testing is needed because not enough is known about the disease and how it is spread.

“Imagine some guy working in the kitchen of a restaurant and he’s HIV-positive and he cuts himself,” Holden said later in an interview, “and his blood is on the glass he serves you water in--you’re dead as a doughnut.”

But medical experts say that there has never been a recorded case of AIDS being transferred by a waitress, busboy or cook through handling food.

AIDS, or acquired immune deficiency syndrome, destroys the body’s immune system, leaving it powerless to resist infection. It is most commonly transmitted through blood or semen during unprotected anal or vaginal sexual intercourse, or through the sharing of contaminated hypodermic needles by intravenous drug users.

Nicole Russo, spokeswoman for AIDS Project Los Angeles, was distressed by Holden’s proposal, which she called “a step back toward the Dark Ages.”

Dr. Thomas Horowitz, chairman of the Los Angeles County Commission on AIDS, called Holden’s motion “rather naive.” If waiters and food preparers with HIV posed a risk to the public, Horowitz said, a law like the one proposed by Holden would have been recommended long ago.

City Councilman Joel Wachs was equally upset with what he called “a horrendous motion that sets back the clock.”

“I’m going to adamantly oppose it because this is not the way AIDS is spread and nobody has ever gotten it in this manner,” Wachs said. “Secondly, testing and retesting of everybody in this category would be mind-bogglingly expensive.

“This points out that despite all the efforts to educate people and dispel myths and stereotypes about how AIDS is transmitted, a lot of people still don’t know.”