A shift in HIV reporting practices: a biopolitical analysis

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), mainstream medical journals and many state legislatures are calling for a drastic shift in what has become standard HIV reporting practice throughout the United States (Burke, 1997; Richardson, 1997a; Rotello, 1997). We are now experiencing a challenge to the long held practice of confidential and anonymous HIV reporting (Grumman, 1997; Richardson, 1998). The federal government, the American Medical Association and several major AIDS organizations have supported state level proposals that require public health officials to adopt name reporting, i.e., monitoring HIV by name not by number (Richardson, 1997b; Richardson, 1997c; Kong, 1997). With number identification, the practice commonly used, there is no link made between number and the patient's name thus assuring anonymity. This article details this shift in public health policy and the biopolitical factors surrounding HIV testing and reporting. This shift is one in which the "duty to warn" takes precedence over the long held professional value of confidentiality.