[Prevalence of patients with HIV infection in an emergency department]

The activity at an ED, primarily aiming at providing rational and qualified support to critically ill patients, is forced to manage very different nosographic entities, including infectious, often contagious, pathologies. In this context the diffusion of HIV infection poses a number of problems concerning both the kind of patients presenting to the ED and the professional risk of health-care workers. In the first four months of 1992 the incidence of patients with recognized or presumed HIV infection at the "Pronto Soccorso Medico" was of 1.78% of 2327 patients admitted. This study aims to contribute to the epidemiologic definition of the risk of HIV infection due to occupational exposure, stressing the peculiar conditions of urgency-emergency often characterizing the activity within the ED.