Legal Limits of AIDS Confidentiality

The impact that the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) is having on social relationships finds expression in legal relationships. The medical or health care setting is only one of many in which legal rights, duties, and powers are affected by individuals' liability to transmit or to suffer from human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection.1 Medical diagnosis, care, and counseling of patients with AIDS certainly raise crucial concerns of health care professionals, allied health workers, and patients. Their concerns are, however, representative rather than exhaustive of those felt throughout society. Fears of HIV infection contracted in the workplace are unreasonable, but nevertheless commonplace, in all but a few occupations. Where fellow employees risk wounds that bleed, for instance, colleagues may demand protection. In schools, teaching and auxiliary staff may fear exposure to children's body fluids, more frequently passed, no doubt, by younger children, and the same is true in day-care centers. Proximatel