No to both questions, but I would treat someone who had an STD and hadn’t told me when I brought the issue up as a liar.
If a hypothetical partner knew he had an STD and hadn’t had the balls to tell me, he better not be in the room when I found out. He’d learn new words of the variety your grandma doesn’t want you to know.
:eek: WHAT?
What kind of “accidental infection” are you talking about? Is he having unprotected sex with his daughter? Are they sharing needles? Is he bleeding into her open wounds? Strictly speaking, he’s not legally or morally obligated to tell her. But in a healthy father-daughter relationship, something this important shouldn’t be kept from her . . . not because she’s in any danger, but because she’s his daughter.
And you seem to be implying that he’s sexually active. Is he using protection and informing his partners?
I suppose accidental contact with blood is not out of the question, but it seems so unlikely as to be effectively impossible.
If it’s too hard to mention that you’re HIV positive, maybe, just maybe, you’re not ready to have sex with said person?
Indeed. I’m pretty certain that the current statistics give a much lower risk. Especially in the case of a stable couple having sex regularly and using properly condoms.
And more importantly, being a sexual abuser isn’t a medical condition. So, even if the patient himself tells the doctor “I’m raping my daughter”, I see no reason why the doctor would be under any obligation not to disclose this information. Maybe I’m wrong about this, but I think that confidentiality only covers medical history. I don’t think your doctor isn’t allowed to tell people that you usually wear red shirts, for instance. Or that you’re a bank robber.
I suppose one of our resident MD will come to shed some light on this.
As for regulations not permitting doctors to alerting proper medical authorities as it is the case with some contagious diseases (at least over here), I think it was originally implemented so that people wouldn’t avoid disclosing their medical condition or refuse testing, as it has been said by other posters. Maybe this is outdated, now that the stigma attached to HIV is less important and that there are efficient drugs.
OTOH, I’m not sure that any STD can be disclosed.
Over here (and I guess in all other countries) there has been people prosecuted for infecting partners while knowing they had AIDS. None succeeded (except a relatively recent case where the culprit had admitted to having deliberately infected as much people as possible for the sake of it :rolleyes: . Since there was an intent to harm, the case has been treated differently).
The reasoning is that the partner is at least partly responsible. For instance, a poster said that HIV+ people engaging in bareback are assholes. Maybe, but HIV- people engaging in bareback with perfect strangers are also idiots. However, in the case of a married couple where one spouse becomes HIV+ following some extra-marital affair, learn about his condition and doesn’t disclose it to the other spouse, the responsibility of the latter is quite dubious. People are hardly going to request AIDS tests from their partners every other month.