Fear Of Dying

The medical workers who are in contact with the patients who have been diagnosed HIV positive expose themselves to a greater risk of contracting the disease by, for example, an accidental prick of the needle or a cut during the operation. The fact that the above mentioned nurses were not aware that their patient was infected should not produce any consequences in practise: the procedure for handling the needles and taking blood is the same both for healthy and infected patients. Actually, the risk taken while handling the biological material infected with AIDS is rather low: out of 160 accidental pricks with the needle only one is likely to cause sero-conversion, i.e. the appearance of antibodies which indicates that the virus entered the bloodstream. The risk is much higher when dealing with the virus of hepatitis B. This virus is transmitted in the same way as HIV, but is so resilient that it can survive the process of sterilisation.

The  "Nis case" has caused a public outcry. The personnel held a meeting behind closed doors and decided to waste the taxpayers' money only to subdue the panic. In the future all patients will have to be tested for AIDS and hepatitis B before undergoing a dialysis treatment and "all patients and personnel" will be checked every six months. Such measures will not help increase the number of healthy people in the dialysis ward, and the costs, that all of us will have to bear because of this case, do not represent an isolated example of impoverishing the healthcare and the society in general.

However, this should come as no surprise in the country where no political party, whether opposition or the one in power, addressed the changes in the healthcare system as an argument in the election campaign.