What the fuck?
Hopefully the HIV test that came back positive will turn out to be a false positive.
Where the hell were the teachers while this kid was sticking 19 classmates with a needle?
and at different tiems of the day, too 
.
at breakfast, at lunch, and in the classroom.
Really weird.
From the description it sounds like she stuck them with an insulin pen. On the one hand, this is kinda good because you can’t draw fluid (or anything) into the pen to inject into somebody, so the only transfer was whaever could stick to the outside of the needle (and inside, a little bit). Not much chance of infection there. On the other hand, they come pre-loaded with insulin, a good healthy slug of which would have really fucked a little kid up. One hopes she was using an empty that her mother had finished using.
Oh I don’t know about that.
It’s been said for years not to share needles to prevent the spread of disease, especially HIV! And now all the sudden it’s a low risk. I just don’t buy it. Hopefully the kid that’s HIV positive was stuck last, but I doubt it.
Are you confusing a “needle stick” with sharing needles used for intravenous drug use? Two different things, I think.
I really can’t imagine why a kid would do this. Hell, I can’t imagine why anyone would do this.
Don’t both come into contact with blood? If not, please disregard.
Good fuckling grief! :smack:
Thank you, Metacom for your intelligent answer. It is, exactly, two separate items. Comepletely. Utterly. Totally. Undeniably.
As an AIDS-peer counselor, as a safer-sex advocate, and as someone who writes about sex for a living and makes sure to advise everyone to PLAY SAFELY no matter what the “play” may invovle, I am still astounded at the lack of information that people have internalized regarding AIDS.
Okay - she stuck them with an instrument that pricks the skin so the teeny-tiny drop of blood that emerges can be tested for insulin content. NOT a big-ole hypodermic needle which goes deep into the skin and withdraws blood.
The chances of HIV-transmission in this case are - as the CDC cited - incredibly low.
No doubt, this child has issues, I do not argue with that. But it’s not like she went around gleefully thinking “I’m gonna give 'em all AIDS.”
And also as the article cited, the positive HIV test is an initial test, which can usually result in a false-positive. Further testing will be done, rest assured. And if the child does indeed have HIV, then I bet you $10 it was not from this incident.
Can we wait until someone has definitely contracted this disease AND it has been proven that transmission was thorugh this tiny tiny tiny loophole before we all have nightmares about the girl at school who willy-nilly infected her classmates.
Sorry, this is a touchy subject, and I get really irked about it. The article is filled with Hyperbole, so do not buy into it. She did a bad thing. Yes. Agreed.
Inky
There is a big difference in chance of exposure between the cases. A needle stick is when a needle gets randomly jabbed into some part of your skin - it may or may not contact a blood vessel (vs. just capillaries) and typically the plunger is not pushed. Sharing a needle means that you are injecting yourself directly into a vein with the contents of the syringe.
Having seen enough kids who’d poke each other with sharpened pencils or stick pins, I’m not having any trouble imagining it.
How would you prove it, though? If this kids gets HIV, then little pokey girl will no doubt get the blame.
Why did she do it? Because it’s funny! Ha ha, I poked you! You people really need to remember what high comedy is to an 8 year old.
Sure, and when I was a kid I poked at other kids with pens and pencils. It just never occured to me to bring something from home to poke them with.
If the girl herself is not infected, nor are any of the other children she jabbed, then clearly it would have had nothing to do with the needle.
I suppose, but wouldn’t it be possible for some kids to get infected and others not? I would think that there are a great many variables for rates of infection. Then again, I don’t know much about the subject, so I’m clearly using rectal verbage.
I’m honestly trying to wrap this around my head, sorry if I look like a moron about needles…
I understand the difference between a prick on the skin and a full injection (and the type of needle I assumed was used in this story). But what I seem to be getting from the other posters is that this type of needle used here is somehow able to contact blood below the skin, but just simple capillaries. Am I to assume that blood in the capillaries cannot contain HIV? Whether a needle is coming into contact with a vein or a capillaries, blood can be housed on the outside of the pricking needle, yes? That’s what I’m trying to figure out.
Can a teeny-tiny HIV virus (I know, ATM Machine, but it would sound ridiculous to say teeny-tiny HIV) be contained within a teeny-tiny drop of blood? Must blood be withdrawn and plunged out of a needle to be spread? What about blood that is exposed to the external part of the needle?
So it’s still possible?
I don’t think anyone is arguing this. Infecting people with anything probably wasn’t the intent at all. The kid, in her own mind, probably thought it was “cool” and that she would show it off at school. She probably wasn’t aware that it may potentially spread disease.
Again, no argument here. The concern is if another student ALREADY had HIV before the sticking, and then more students might get stuck with the same needle soon after. Assuming the student in question actually has HIV, and that it’s not a false-positive.
Child A brings needle to school, sticks child B (that may have HIV). Child A then sticks Child C, potentially giving Child C the HIV virus from Child B.
Are we saying this risk is impossible, or the risk is low?
We’re arguing the possible outcomes here. I didn’t read the article as fact, and I hope no else has. It was sketchy. But lets just say that there wasn’t a false positive…
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Right, but the needle doesn’t have HIV on its own. Someone who had been poked by the needle would have to have HIV already for HIV to be transmitted by the needle to someone else. So, if only one of the kids has HIV, the needle did not transmit it from one kid to another.
I think the issue is the viral load of an insulin pen vs. sharing needles.
Suppose the pen is used to poke someone who has HIV. Suppose you now take this contaminated pen and poke someone else with it. Because of the nature of the needle in the pen (short) and the nature of the original injection (very shallow) there will be very little virus on the tip of that needle to infect any people that it comes into contact with.
Contrast this with sharing a needle for IV drug use. Person A (who’s HIV positive) inserts the needle into his arm maybe an inch. He then may or may not pull back on the plunger (“jacking”, I think) to make sure he’s hit a vein which causes some of his blood to enter the syringe. Then he injects. Now person B uses person A’s rig. She sucks herself up a dose of whatever into the same syringe that once contained a couple hundred microlitres of person A’s blood. She then inserts the same needle which now has a thin coating of person A’s blood on it an inch into her arm and injects a dose laced with person A’s blood. And who knows? Maybe she won’t get HIV…this time. Some IV drug users repeatedly engage in this type of behaviour.
So this is my conclusion:
While there IS a risk of getting HIV from a contaminated insulin pen, the risk is MUCH LOWER than sharing IV drug paraphenalia.
But I could be wrong.
I thought that HIV was destroyed by contact with air, and the only way to transmit it was through exchange of certain bodily fluids. I think that would push the chance of being infected by a shallow needle poke pretty close to zero.
Ah, I see your logic. Yep.
Unless Grandma has HIV, in which case the virus would have to survive the trip to school, which is very unlikely.
One thing that confuses me, however, is how fast they could test someone for the virus. I thought it took at least several weeks to incubate. If no other kids are infected, coud it be that they’re testing too soon?
Basically correct; the virus has an extremely short lifespan (sorry, no figures on hand) outside of bodily fluids. I suspect that in the needle stick case, you are either taking blood quickly from one person and then getting stuck, or assuming that a small drop leaks out from inside the tip of the needle once it contacts the stuck person’s tissues. The virus only survives in T-cells, so from there it would have to get into your bloodstream (rather than being trapped between skin cells, say), find a T-cell, and infect it. It’s not impossible, but it’s highly unlikely.
I have a figure from my orientation a few years ago at my current job, which states that only 76 health care workers (just in the US, I believe?) have contracted HIV via workplace exposure since 1981. Again, sorry, no cite, but that’s what Infection Control at my hospital had as data. I’m sure that low number is in large part due to the small chance of contracting the virus via a needle stick.
Depends on the test. There are four tests that look for the virus itself, not for the antibodies to the virus. They can be done within 2-3 days of infection.