Such a policy would be unworkable, unfair and not worth the high cost of running the testing. Doctors and hospitals should already be taking appropriate precautions to prevent transmission of HIV during surgery or treatment. The already small risks to patients and doctors are virtually eliminated when health care workers use proper precaution in dealing with bodily fluids. Additional regulation and blanket testing is not necessary and would only result in a $2 billion waste of funds that could be better spent on research to cure AIDS or on public health educational initiatives. Besides, any policy of requiring doctors to take a mandatory test and not patients would be one-sided. Doctors are the ones who face a higher risk of contracting the virus because they deal with the bodily fluids of so many different patients. Meanwhile, ethical doctors who have any reason to believe that they might be infected should get themselves tested. Doctors should also voluntarily inform their patients if they are carriers of the disease, but to mandate universal testing of doctors would be a mistake.
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