Your suggestion would not work with those who come into nursing homes, with HIV...I worked in two different nursing homes, and we were told straight out, that if someone came into the nursing home with AIDS we would not be told that fact, even tho we had to care for them...instead, it was expected that in all cases we would always use 'Universal Precautions(hand washing, use of protective gloves, and protective clothing), when dealing with any resident of the nursing home, and in that way we would also be able to protect ourselves against any HIV infection...
Now it has been a couple of years since I have worked in the nursing homes, so things may have changed, but I am just relating how things were when I worked there last, which would be 1998....
Whenever a new resident came into a nursing home, the charge nurse would always tell us what was wrong with the resident, which makes it easier for everyone, the RNs, the LPNS, the Aides, the Therapists, to deal with the resident and their particular problems..
But HIV was always treated differently...we were not allowed to know if someone was HIV positive...but of course, we always found a way around actually saying out loud that someone was HIV positive...the nurse would say something like the new resident had a 'blood borne pathogen', and then the nurse would really stare at us, and say, "Do you understand what I mean?"...and that always meant that the new resident was HIV positive....we were just not allowed to say it out loud....
And I think this is really wrong...most healthcare workers, try to always use 'Universal Precautions'...but sometimes incidents happen, like a resident may fall, and you rush to help them, and in your concern for them, may not take all the precautions needed to protect yourself...it can happen...and if you dont know for sure that a resident is HIV positive, some health care workers may not be as careful as they should be...
I dont know how this works out in hospitals...I just know that in nursing homes here in Washington State, it is(or was at least until 1998)a matter of confidentiality, and HIV positive status is not supposed to be revealed...but with the population living longer, and more and more people needed care in a nursing home, you may be taking care of someone with HIV positive status, and not actually be aware of it...
I know that it's changed for emergency workers. If we have an exposure during a call, at least in Texas, we notify the hospital, and they draw blood and do a complete battery of tests. However, universal precautions are a good idea. I quit teaching CPR in the early nineties because I was told that the only thing the American Heart Association would allow us to say was that "no person is known to have contracted AIDS from properly doing CPR. I asked the instructor how many times he'd done CPR on someone with AIDS. He admitted he'd never done CPR for real. I told him I worked in downtown Austin, Texas, in emergency services, and that working on someone with AIDS wasn't hypothetical to me, it was Tuesday. I then mentioned that many people with AIDS weren't simply suffering from AIDS, but had secondary infections, including tuberculosis and hepatitis. Both of these diseases are easily communicable doing proper CPR.
Most people in the later stages of AIDS, at least if they're in bad enough shape to be in a nursing home are pretty identifiable. It's a horrible disease in the later stages. Kaposi's sarcoma causes huge black spots to appear on the body, they waste away to skin and bone, and generally have picked up so many secondary diseases that they sound like the smoking lounge in an emphysema clinic.
Contact tracing is going to be minimally effective on homosexual men, though, because so much of the sex is anonymous. Often, the sex is through gloryholes in porno movie houses, and the men never see anything except what sticks through the wall. Also, according to several surveys of homosexual men done around 12 years ago, over half of the men with AIDS said they would not tell a potential partner they were infected, because they were afraid of "ruining the moment."
Not to wax religious on this, but I think this is the definition of being in bondage to sin, and indicates the grip homosexuality has on men, even though they claim they "love" other men. Over half of the men surveyed were willing to risk condemning a man they claimed to love to a slow, painful, rotting away death for a half hour or so of pleasure.
Kaposi's sarcoma
Some hetero men aren't any better. I know of three women, one caught herpes, one chlamydia, and one venereal warts from men who didn't tell them they had sexually transmitted diseases. Of course, I probably know a lot more women that this has happened to, these are just the ones who confided in me.