Content area
Full text
Fatal Extraction: The story behind the Florida dentist accused of infecting his patients with HIV and poisoning public health by Mark Carl Rom. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, CA, 1997.
Kimberly Bergalis and David Acer, two persons in Florida who died from HIV-related complications, are not only real people involved in a real incident in the history of HIV surveillance and policy in this country; they are also symbols of the larger struggle between what the author aptly calls public health versus public health (p. 167). These two persons who were dying from a ravaging and cruel disease became magnets for political and ideological conflict. In the midst of the debate that their stories sparked, they were each depicted sometimes as monsters, but by people who defined themselves as being on opposite sides of a conflict. Why was it necessary to choose sides between two persons who had the same disease? Rom sets out in this excellent journalistic report to answer that question.
David Acer was a dentist who developed AIDS and ultimately retired because of poor health. Kimberly Bergalis, along with five other patients of Dr. Acer, evidently contracted HIV as a result of dental procedures in Acer's office. Because Bergalis was the first of these five patients to be identified as having possibly been infected through Acer's dental practice, the first to be identified publicly, and the most vocal in journalistic and legislative arenas, the book focuses on her story more than the others.
The discovery and investigation of the possible HIV transmission through a dentist resulted in a quagmire of debate and a serious policy puzzle and remains to this day what a New York Times reporter called the "AIDS mystery that won't go away." Rom became involved in this story as principal investigator of the review of the Center for Disease Control's (CDC's) handling of this case which the U.S. General Accounting Office conducted at the request of Representative Ted Weiss of New York (pp. 159, 212).
After Bergalis's putative infection from dental work became known, there ensued a clash of public health and public hysteria, a clash of science and stigma. Everything is potentially confusing about this story: the chain of events; the interpersonal dynamics; the facts about HIV transmission, measurement, and...