I am totally scared!!!

[Max79]

Hello,

I am totally scared after yesterday's experience. I was drinking beer a couple of my friends. One of them hurt the inside of his palm so he had a slightly bleeding spot (I mean there was some red substance but it was not dropping and  I remember him licking it).

After a while we all went home and shook our hands.

Now I fear that when I shook his hand there might have been transferred a tiny amount of blood on my hand and then I might have transfered some to my eyes (I rub them very often). I don't remember exaxtly if I rubbed them because I was drunk and didn't think about that at the time.

Could I get hiv this way? Should I get tested?

Thanks. I really appreciate your answer because I am so scared after this.

[H. Hunter Handsfield, M.D.]

Relax.  Nobody ever caught HIV that way.  If HIV could be transmitted by such contact, you would have been infected long ago.  Look at it this way:  the kids and household members who live in the same house with an HIV infected person, sharing eating utensil, hugging and kissing, and bandaging each others cuts, etc, etc NEVER catch HIV, even after several years.  For 100% protection against HIV, all you need to do is plan on safe sex and never sharing injection equipment with another person.

Best wishes--   HHH, MD

[Willl]

On this topic, Dr. I was wondering if you had read this paper and think there is any validity to it? Though still very rare.

http://tinyurl.com/kor87

[H. Hunter Handsfield, M.D.]

Thanks.  I don't know that paper (and don't regularly read that [obscure?] journal--in fact never heard of it).  And I have only glanced at the abstract, so it would be unfair to comment on the validity of the paper as a whole.  But I would point out that 1) it is a hypothesis only; and 2) that the notion of casual transmission apparently has not be raised by other investigators in response to that paper or any other--i.e., there has been no recent research or "buzz" about casual transmission in the medical literature, at scientific meetings, etc.  Every other HIV/AIDS breakthrough (or any remotely new and important research finding) has been widely known, or at least debated, almost immediately.  Silence is a good indication nothing new is going on.

However, for 4-5 years a fairly intense debate has been underway about whether sexual transmission has been over-emphasized and non-sexual routes under-appreciated, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa.  But the alternative explanations all involve overt blood exposure, especially use of non-sterile medical instruments and procedures, not household or other casual contact.  (I am on the side that still believes that sex is by far the dominant explanation.)

HHH, MD

[monkeyflower]

I just looked up that journal. As you might have gathered from the title, lol, they publish ideas. That sounds kinda cool - except apparently they can be *anyone's* ideas, regardless of experience, knowledge, fact... Here's the key sentence from the description: "Medical Hypotheses will publish ideas or criticisms of ideas from any person, irrespective of whether any experimental testing of the ideas has been performed by the writer." I'd take any article in that journal with a grain of salt :-)