If a person sneezes while standing next to you and does not bother to cover his or her mouth, does the person on the receiving end of the infectious germ shower have a right to sue them if they contract their illness? In order to do so, would he be required to prove that the disease was transferred to him by way of the aforementioned vector??
If a person has AIDS and knowingly has unprotected sex with someone without informing them of their condition, aren’t they liable if their partner contracts HIV, even if they can’t prove that’s how they contracted it? How are these two situations different??
One would probably not want to start a precedent of being liable for cold transmission, since the next person who gets a cold from touching a doorknob you recently touched could sue you right back.
I don’t know what the law is, but if you willingly have unprotected sex with someone without demanding a current health screening, you are taking a gamble and should be prepared to take full responsibility for the outcome.
Magic Johnson was sucessfully sued for giving a partner HIV. I say if you’re having unprotected sex with a pro athlete there’s a certain measure of assumption of the risk on your part, but I wasn’t the judge.
Yes, you do need to prove causation, in both cases. Negligence is a duty of care owed to you that was breached, actually and proximately causing you damage. If you can’t show causation, or it isn’t one of the situations where causation was assumed, you can’t show negligence. There’s a big problem with showing that you got sick because and only because someone sneezed and didn’t cover their mouth. You could have got sick even if he had, you could have gotten it from somewhere else entirely because it’s going around, etc. etc.
Well, what if someone had Tuberculosis and they walked up to you and sneezed on you deliberately. Would you still have to prove causation if you came down with TB?
Well, if it was deliberate, it wasn’t negligence, it was assault and battery. All you have to do is show he sneezed on you to deliberately harm and/or offend you, and if you can futher show that the sneeze resulted in your contracting TB, you can include that in your damages.
The only reference that I could find about Magic Johnson being sued for giving someone HIV was in this Lansing State Journal article, and it says that this particular suit was dismissed.
A right to sue? In the U.S. there seems to be a right to sue for nearly any reason. Whether one can win the suit is another matter, and in this case very highly questionable. It wouldn’t surprise me if the suit were dismissed as frivolous.
Thousands of people get colds every day without someone sneezing on them. Thousands of people sneeze every day without having a cold. Proving cause would essentially be impossible.
The AIDS scenario is different in many significant respects. Direct transmission of the illness is more easily established. Lack of other likely or possible causes for the illness is more easily established. The consequences of the illness are much more severe. Negligence or malicious intent is pretty much a given in a deliberate sex act, whereas with a sneeze–a spontaeous occurrence that happens to everyone–either would be difficult or impossible to prove. Frankly, I can’t imagine anyone taking seriously the idea of suing over a cold.
Actually, that’s correct. Although the judge held that Johnson could be liable on a battery claim and the plaintiff had successfully pleaded battery, the plaintiff was unable to adduce evidence subsequent to the ruling that Johnson had actual knowledge of the virus and the case was later dismissed. So remove “successfully sued” and replace with “a prima facie case was sucessfully pleaded.”
The case is Doe v. Johnson 817 F.Supp 1382 (W.D. Mich., 1993).
Not really. Even if someone were held liable for cold transmission due to failing to cover their nose/mouth when they sneeze, that does not mean that a similar case could be made for doorknob transmission. First of all, the causation difficulties that have already been noted by others would be even more magnified in this instance. More importantly, failing to cover your mouth when you know you are ill is unreasonable behavior; opening a door is not. Unintentional torts generally (not always) require that the tortfeasor be negligent, i.e., unreasonably careless, in his behavior and that this negligence caused the injury; an open-mouthed sneeze probably is negligent, touching a doorknob probably is not.
Actually, something like thisis asort of concern for me. I live in a condominium where one of the members is HIV positive. He doesn’t exactly get along with my family so he could accidently bleed a little on the doorknob or something. Wrong place at the wrong time could mean bad news for one of the people in the building. I was wondering if he could get in trouble for doing this, even if no one knows if he actually planted it there.
In other words, extremely unlikely, as not only would the virus have to survive for that long in the blood (and happen to be present in some kind of reasonable concentration in the blood - viral levels can drop to basically undetectable in viral load tests), but the person who touched the knob would have to have some kind of open wound and get the blood in it. HIV isn’t all that hardy once it’s been outside the body and out in the open for a while.
IANAD/N, but I work non-invasively with patients with AIDS in a large Chicago hospital. We take no additional precautions with these patients than we would with anyone else, including when it comes to blood draws. There are, after all, more diseases that can be transmitted via blood than just AIDS.
To have any kind of likelihood of successfully transmitting the disease he can’t just “bleed a little on the doorknob.” AIDS is hard to get – even unprotected sex isn’t a guarantee of transmission, although it’s certainly incredibly dangerous. Unless your neighbor has an opportunity to inject you with his blood, you really have nothing to worry about – assuming you’re not having sex with him, of course.
What is more worrisome is the fact that your post suggests that you assume this neighbor may be willing to try to kill someone in your family just because you “do[n’t] exactly get along.” If he has threatened you or done something to make you reasonably fearful, you should contact the police. Otherwise, you should think more carefully before you accuse (even in your own imagination) someone of plotting murder. Yes, he has something dangerous at his disposal, but so does everyone else in your building with a bread knife or a pair of scissors.
I disagree. Tests have shown that transmission through touch are at least as common as through inhalation. From this link:
The common cold is most often transmitted by direct contact with the respiratory secretions of someone who is infected, usually by hand-to-hand contact. The infected respiratory secretions are passed from one person’s hand to another. The second person then touches his or her eyes or rubs his or her nose, spreading the virus there, where it can cross the delicate membranes and cause infection. It is also possible to become infected by touching a surface, such as a tabletop or doorknob, that was recently touched by an infected person and then touching your eyes or nose. Viruses can survive on such surfaces for up to three hours.
Therefore I would argue that failure to wash your hands or cover them before touching public property when you know you’re ill is no less negligent than failing to cover you mouth when sneezing.
For those of you who would dismiss such a lawsuit as ‘frivolous’, how would you react if someone who had it in for you walked up to you one day when they had a nasty virus and sneezed all over you without making any effort at all to hold it in, cover their mouth, or turn away from you.
"*Hey, come here for a minute, I have something to tell you-
AAAACHOOOOOO!
Whoops, sorry about that. Sometimes they just sneak up on you. What was that I was going to tell you? Oh, I forgot. Bye-bye, now.*"
You’d still have to prove intention. I don’t think a person could win in a case like this. Jeez, I could sue my sister for bringing her cooty-ridden daughter over, because she knows that the kid hangs out at school with other cooty-ridden young 'uns.
Doesn’t matter. The focus here is on reasonability of precaution. It is unreasonable to see someone standing in front of you, know you are contagious, and honk snot on them anyway because it is so, so easy to cover your mouth. It is not unreasonable to close a door because compared to the small risk of contaigion and the relatively minor effects most likely to occur therefrom aren’t worth the relatively onerous precautions you’d have to take to open a door (wiping it down every time with a brand new handkerchief or getting someone else to follow you around all day to handle your doors).
Again, as has been stated earlier, this is all kinda silly, as causation would be nigh impossible to prove in most circumstances.