Abstract
The author, a consultant physician at City Hospital, Edinburgh, proposes a series of public health measures to control the transmission of the AIDS-associated HTLV-III virus among intravenous drug abusers. He supports screening of blood without consent, tracing and screening the sexual contacts of HTLV-III positive individuals, counseling of the patients and their contacts, arranging access to unshared needles and syringes for persistent drug abusers, and notification of the general practitioners of hospital patients found to be HTLV-III positive. Welsby contends that his proposals do not violate the Department of Health and Social Security's code on confidentiality of health data and that several of his suggested actions are already in use against other, less menacing, sexually-transmitted diseases.
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