have ever had in terms of our training and competence. Our people were willing to walk into an operating room or ambulance and work with a potentially lethal infectious agent because they were confident of their and our ability to handle it.
THE LARGER ISSUES The issue of infectious disease is, of course, of far broader concern to cryonics than just the safety of the personnel. It touches on issues of public health and it raises the spectre of serious and immediate pressure for regulation. Virtually all other institutions or individuals who handle patients with communicable diseases -- from physicians to nurses to morticians -- are specially trained, licensed, and regulated by public health officials. Cryonicists must thus be doubly careful to follow established government mandated practices for the handling of contaminated materials and for their proper disposal. This means rigid use of good isolation technique, use of sterile supplies to protect not only the patient but also the personnel from contact with dirty sharps, proper labeling and handling of lab samples, and, just as important, autoclaving or gas sterilization of all contaminated trash before it is released to the public. ----------------------------------------------------------------------(14)
Cryonics organizations which do not have extensive in-house training for personnel in the application of sterile technique and the handling of infectious material should probably avoid taking such patients until they can bring the necessary skills to bear. This is the case not only due to the possibility of retributive interference from public health officials (who have already previously demonstrated successfully that they can shut down a cryonics organization (the Cryonics Society of New York)) but to the potentially immense liability which will result from inadequate training and protection of staff.
A GROWING RISK Increasingly, it will be difficult to sort out which patients are or are not a risk. In some ways AIDS patients may present less of a risk than those who are carrying the disease but not yet ill. In full-blown AIDS the Tcells which serve as the virus' primary breeding grounds have almost all been killed, so ironically, it is often the case that AIDS patients in the terminal phases of the disease have little or no detectable virus and are probably less infectious than many apparently healthy carriers! By far the greater risk may be the ever expanding population of HIV seropositive