Keeping Health-Care Workers Healthy

Abstract

Exposure to the hepatitis B virus constitutes a serious occupational hazard to many health-care workers. The risk that health-care workers will contract hepatitis B from the patients they seek to heal is far greater than the risk that patients will become infected by health-care workers. Consequently, within health-care institutions hepatitis B virus infection is predominantly an issue of worker health, not patient care.From a legal perspective, the hepatitis B virus possesses a number of characteristics that present unique liability issues. Infection from this virus is largely unidentified and often silent.¹ It is persistent in the carrier state,^{1 , 2} it can . . .