A Salt Lake lawyer has asked Utah's attorney general to investigate an AIDS prevalence study recently conducted by the State Department of Health and prosecute anyone who advised health officials that the survey was permissible.
Carolyn Nichols, an attorney with the firm Haley & Stolebarger, insists the screening, involving more then 24,000 newborn babies, abortion recipients and hospital patients without their knowledge, violated the state's public health laws.Attorney General Paul Van Dam said he was aware of Nichols' written request and would review it when he returned to his office Monday. He was out of the state Friday.
Bud Scruggs, Gov. Norm Bangerter's chief of staff, called the blind screening test "the least intrusive of all possible ways of measuring the depth of the problem."
"We support our Department of Health and have confidence that they ran this thing through the proper legal and ethical checks," Scruggs said.
The federally funded program provided for AIDS testing of every baby born, plus a sample of women who had abortions and people who were hospitalized from October 1988 to June 1989.
Both Scruggs and Nichols became parents during this time period, but neither knew their babies were involved in the screening.
State epidemiologist Craig Nichols said the samples from abortion recipients and hospital patients were `waste blood,' which would have otherwise been discarded. The testing of the babies involved taking blood from the newborns' heels - a routine procedure used by hospitals to test for congenital disorders.
Because of the prenatal blood exchange between mothers and fetuses, the tests actually reflect the infection status of the mother, rather than the baby, Craig Nichols explained.
Craig Nichols said that although the tests were done without the patients' knowledge, the tests were "blind." The blood samples came only with a code number, no name, and were not traceable back to the patients whose blood was taken.
Nonetheless, Carolyn Nichols insists the screening "is strictly government invading the rights and privacy of citizens."
She said it also violates the state's health code which states that the department can collect health data only on a voluntary basis, "except where there is specific legal authority to compel reporting of the health data."
The attorney insists the health department broke the law by not telling patients they were being tested - and why the data was being collected.
"Every individual citizen should have had the right to refuse (the test)," she said.
Scruggs doesn't agree.
"We have full confidence in Dr. (Suzanne) Dandoy (health department executive director) so far as medical ethics and legal obligations are concerned," Scruggs said.