Reporting HIV Cases

While there are sound scientific reasons for tracking the spread of HIV, it is easy to see why groups of people at highest risk of infection would either avoid medical care, in case of mandatory testing, or avoid HIV tests, in case of mandatory reporting.

As reported in your article (March 7), emergency room physician Brian Johnston states that “a mandatory reporting law would (help us) find out where these cases are coming from, if it’s being spread by homosexuals or through drug addicts.” Isn’t it time for medical authorities to associate HIV transmission with well-documented “at risk” behaviors rather than with misleadingly broad groups of people?

Only when medical professionals stop stigmatizing this disease through misinformation will members of the general public feel comfortable getting tested. In the meantime, if anyone needs to be reported, it is medical authorities who do more to foster ignorance than understanding.

KEN GOULD

Pasadena

I am happy to see that the California Medical Assn. has come out in favor of public health measures to slow the spread of HIV. In doing so, they are endorsing precisely what they denounced in 1986, when they came out against Proposition 64, which was put on the ballot by supporters of Lyndon LaRouche. I hope that CMA members have had the opportunity to reflect on how many Californians were needlessly infected with HIV during that eight-year period, because no effort was made to locate and educate asymptomatic carriers.

DANIEL PLATT

Los Angeles

In “HIV Tests Must Stay Anonymous” (Commentary, March 13), Mark Senak of AIDS Project Los Angeles repeats the old saw that mandatory reporting of positive HIV tests to the Public Health Department would lead to widespread discrimination. The fact is that in the many states that have had such a policy over the last decade there has yet to be one case of discrimination reported to the Centers for Disease Control. When are we as a society going to base our response to this holocaust on reality rather than hysteria?

RICHARD WETZEL MD

Huntington Beach