HIV test privacy rights

[asterroc]

The state of Massachusetts is to begin requiring doctors whose patients test positive for HIV report the names of said HIV positive people. Wonderful! This is after pressure from the Feds - apparently soon federal funding to states's AIDS patients and programs will be dependant upon reporting names from tests. Beautiful. Are they going to make people start wearing red triangles on their sleeves or something next?

I totally understand wanting to track where "outbreaks" occur, but I see no reason this can't be done by number at the testing stations. Gah, and apparently syphilis and gonorrhea already have to have names reported! "In addition to name, other identifying information such as age and address, and factors that put patients at risk for contracting the illness, are typically included." [Boston Globe] Man. I wanna see the ACLU on *this* one.

Comments

[sammka.livejournal.com]

!!!!!

I can see wanting to report some sort of statistics, so that they can keep track of how many people are diagnosed with it when and where, but names? Addresses? Eek!

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I know. If you read the whole article, apparently anyone with AIDS already has their full info reported, but not yet anyone with HIV but not full-blown AIDS. It surprises me.

I can understand the reasoning to some extent: that info is the best way to track the spread in detail. If you have that info you can theoretically figure out who's a vector, which might be relevant in criminal cases of deliberate HIV infection, or helping to curb the spread of the disease, but yeah. I figured you'd have something to say about it - it's worse I think than reporting abuse of minors.