"JANE DOE"

NURSE

Only one case is known in which an HIV-positive health-care worker apparently transmitted the virus to patients (see card 7), but a number of doctors and nurses have been infected in the course of their duties. For example, when Dr. Hacib Aoun (1955-1992) from Costa Rica was working at Johns Hopkins University Hospital in 1982, a test tube filled with contaminated blood broke in his hand, piercing his skin. He died of AIDS 10 years later.

In 1988 in Utica, New York, a prisoner with AIDS was admitted to a state hospital where he had an epileptic seizure and began to punch and kick the medical team working with him. Two correctional officers assigned to the prisoner did not respond to the hospital personnel's pleas for help in subduing him, and in the scuffle a nurse's hand was jabbed with a hypodermic syringe containing the patient's HIV-positive blood. When she contracted AIDS, she sued the state for compensation.

Married and the mother of three children, the nurse was 38 years old when the case came to court in 1992. Because of her fear of the stigma associated with having AIDS, she was identified in court papers simply as "Jane Doe" to insure her privacy. At that time she was thought to have a life expectancy of only five years. Considering the suffering caused by "loss of enjoyment of seeing her children mature and marry" and the loss of "a happy social life with her husband," the judge awarded Nurse Doe $5.4 million, the largest pain-and-suffering award in New York State history and probably the largest award given in the United States for a person's becoming infected with HIV.

Next Card 13: TERRY DOLAN: Conservative Fundraiser