Patients Recalled After Aids Death

A private health clinic near Paris has written to more than 900 of its past patients offering them Aids tests, after it emerged that an elderly man had died of the disease following treatment by a member of its staff who is infected with the HIV virus.

The Jacques Cartier clinic in Massy, in the southern Paris suburbs, said the risk to the 926 past patients was "extremely limited" and that no formal link between the 74-year-old man's death and the unidentified staff member's condition had so far been established.

The clinic said an inquiry, carried out in conjunction with the local health authority, had already ruled out the possibility of contamination from a blood transfusion, and that no incident involving exposure to the staff member's own blood had been reported during the man's operation in October 2001.

The inquiry was opened after the patient, who had undergone a routine heart bypass and valve replacement operation, was found to be HIV positive three months after the surgery. A routine test three days before the operation had proved negative.

A spokesman for the clinic said the staff member was one of between 10 and 15 people who had been involved in the operation, but refused to name him or to say whether he was a doctor, a nurse, a surgeon or an anaesthetist. He was found to be HIV positive after a random HIV test of the clinic's entire medical team.

France does not require doctors or patients to be screened for Aids, considering it a matter of individual responsibility. In Switzerland, a former doctor who failed to tell a patient he was infected with HIV was last week given a suspended seven-month jail sentence after a court decided he had acted irresponsibly.

France is still scarred by the memory of a huge Aids-related scandal dating back to 1985, when the national transfusion service repeatedly ignored expert medical advice and continued to give transfusions of untested and untreated blood that were eventually found to have infected as many as 3,600 people with the HIV virus. Up to 1,200 have since died.