Recovery of HIV at Autopsy

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Abstract
To the Editor: The occupational risk among health care workers of infection with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) remains an important issue.1 2 3 This risk has been traditionally evaluated in terms of seroconversion among health care workers after inadvertent exposure to body fluids from patients.4 5 Several reports have used postmortem HIV-antibody and p24-antigen testing for epidemiologic and diagnostic purposes.6 7 8 To our knowledge, the viability of HIV after a patient's death, the key variable in assessing the actual risk to personnel engaged in prosection, has not been addressed in the medical literature. We report the recovery of HIV from a patient 18 . . .