Reducing the risk of AIDS: changing behaviors and techniques.

Although hepatitis B virus and HIV are similar, they are not transmitted with equal ease; the blood of persons with HIV has fewer infectious particles, which reduces the likelihood of transmitting the virus from average exposures. At present, the number of health-care workers who have developed AIDS as a result of occupational exposure is so small that it is statistically undetectable in a large mass of cases. The guiding principle in developing new surgical techniques must be the assumption that the blood of any patient, regardless of diagnosis, may contain infectious agents. Stress should be placed on altering behavior and techniques to reduce infectious risks to health-care workers from contact with blood rather than on identifying patients with HIV.