HIV/AIDS in Laboratory Workers Infected HTLV-IIIB

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by working with HIV is small, those who work with the virus must "practice safe science,"
said William A. Blattner, M.D., chief of NCI's Viral Epidemiology Branch and lead author
of the study.
"Laboratory workers need to adhere strictly to existing biosafety guidelines," said
Blattner. "The laboratory strain of HIV has not become attenuated in the test tube and can
cause clinical disease."
The three workers came from laboratories involved in large-scale production of the
strain of virus used in blood tests at the time of the first report of an infected worker in
1988. * NCI scientists noted that the rate of infection for workers is very small -- about.48
infections per 100 person years of work. Based on this report, safety experts from the
National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reemphasized the need for strict adherence to biosafety guidelines with voluntary HIV
surveillance. The three cases documented by the NCI researchers are likely to represent the
total number of workers testing positive for HIV infections acquired from non-clinical
materials, said Blattner.
The researchers are unsure how the worker known as F-1, who was documented in
the earlier paper, was exposed to the virus. Seven years after testing positive for infection,
F-1 remains clinically stable with CD4 counts between 250 and 400 cells/mm3, and is
receiving no anti-viral therapy as yet. Normal CD4 counts in the laboratory used for
*The article, "Risk of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV-1) infection among laboratory
workers," appeared in the January 1, 1988 issue of Science.
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