Daughter of the Ring of Fire » Blog Archive » HIV-Positive Man Vandalizes Church, Media Panics

Jun

2009

HIV-Positive Man Vandalizes Church, Media Panics

Posted on 15:07, June 8th, 2009 by EKSwitaj

Read my latest flash, Venison, at 52|250.

A man broke into, and generally trashed, a South Seattle church while high on PCP. A church being vandalized is pretty much guaranteed to make the news. This case, however, provided the local media with a special opportunity for sensationalization, as the man turned out to HIV-positive (he also has hepatitis, but that isn’t what made the headlines). Over the weekend, local TV news reports referred to the site as a “biohazard” and referred constantly to the dangers posed by blood containing the virus.

One problem though: spattered blood dries fairly quickly and, according to the CDC,

To obtain data on the survival of HIV, laboratory studies have required the use of artificially high concentrations of laboratory-grown virus . . . CDC studies have shown that drying of even these high concentrations of HIV reduces the amount of infectious virus by 90 to 99 percent within several hours. Since the HIV concentrations used in laboratory studies are much higher than those actually found in blood or other specimens, drying of HIV-infected human blood or other body fluids reduces the theoretical risk of environmental transmission to that which has been observed – essentially zero. Incorrect interpretations of conclusions drawn from laboratory studies have in some instances caused unnecessary alarm.

Results from laboratory studies should not be used to assess specific personal risk of infection because (1) the amount of virus studied is not found in human specimens or elsewhere in nature, and (2) no one has been identified as infected with HIV due to contact with an environmental surface. Additionally, HIV is unable to reproduce outside its living host (unlike many bacteria or fungi, which may do so under suitable conditions), except under laboratory conditions; therefore, it does not spread or maintain infectiousness outside its host.

In other words, the chances of infection are, barring a miracle, nil. Now there may well be a more legitimate reason for treating the scene as hazardous, but the media is failing to report it. Not only is this inaccurate reporting, it’s also highly irresponsible and dangerous. In the early days of the HIV epidemic, people came to fear those with the disease in part because of rampant misinformation about how it spread; the stigma has never been thoroughly erased, and stories like this can only serve to make it worse.