Slashdot Mirror
UK Health Clinic Accidentally Publishes HIV Status of 800 Patients
An anonymous reader writes: A sexual health clinic in London accidentally disclosed the HIV positive status of almost 800 patients. The Guardian reports: "The health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, has ordered an inquiry into how the NHS handles confidential medical information after the “completely unacceptable” breach of the privacy of hundreds of HIV patients. The 56 Dean Street clinic in London apologized on Wednesday after sending a newsletter on Tuesday which disclosed the names and email addresses of about 780 recipients. The newsletter is intended for people using its HIV and other sexual health services, and gives details of treatments and support.
As I understand it, this was your usual failure to use blind copy (BCC) when sending a bulk email. The HIV status of people was not divulged, only the email addresses of other recipients (not sure if this included the recipient account names as well as the address). The recipients were people who had used the clinic for some services.
--- To save space, would readers please insert their own witty comment -here-
So what seems to have happened is that someone, some admin guy, was asked to send out the HIV Monthly newsletter by email. Does just that but in such a way all email addresses were visible. Now, probably like a lot of people, I also receive emailed newsletters and similar. Occasionally they also have all other recipients email addresses exposed. So my thoughts are whether this is a general issue that affects all mass email or is it something specific to this clinic? Receipt of a newsletter from an HIV clinic does not necessarily mean you have HIV. My guess is a lot of recipients will be trustees, bureaucrats and various others. Also, is an email address personal information? Certainly some people will have their name in their address but for many those email addresses are already on twitter, facebook and various other locations. So this particular case seems like a storm in a tea cup, but it also suggests there might be a general issue in the way mass email is sent that needs some thought.
What the fuck is a graphist?
Standard issue baby boomer reluctance to use computers properly.
"Why would we buy a tool to send bulk email when the intern can do it for peanuts?"
This is why, executives. This is why you need to use the correct tools. Just do a mail merge. It is unbelievably simple. So simple that the intern could do it.
We don't need any privacy right? Unless they are terrorists they have nothing to hide.
Someone the OP has a personal issue with, I assume.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
Take out CC: in mails and only allow BCC:
I seriously hate it when my friends send a mail to me with some other people and my email address is not hand-delivered to the virus and spam-harvester infested horrors of my other friends. If ALL emails only went out by BCC this would not happen.
Mail server maintainers such as Postfix/Exim and such should band together and simply phase out CC and start treating the CC header as a BCC header. And then should begin rejecting mails with a CC with multiple email addresses in it outright. This would solve half of the world's spam problems in a few years too.
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
Because people are stupid.
HIV is pretty much non-contagious as long as you don't exchange some sort of body fluid. Now, I don't know how you go about in your everyday life, but I don't routinely have people spill blood, semen or other stuff coming out of their body into mine.
But people are stupid.
Remember the H1N1 craze? Swine flu? Or any other of the sky-is-falling pandemics? SARS anyone? Yes, they are contagious. How many cases did we have around the US and Europe? Was it more than a dozen combined? People went apeshit over that crap. Mostly because they didn't have the first clue about it other than "oh it's killing people, watch out!"
And now imagine these people should interact with people who actually carry a deadly disease. No matter that there is no sensible way they could get infected, they WILL go bananas over it.
HIV is already a disease that puts a terrible weight on your psyche. Making these people outcasts for no reason whatsoever doesn't really help it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Stigma and discrimination. HIV +ve individuals are routinely denied housing, employment and ostracised from society due to their HIV status. By making a public register this would further discourage people from seeking appropriate testing and treatment.
The most common mode of transmission is through sexual intercourse and effective treatment of HIV (through the use of HAARTs) significantly reduces the chance of passing the infection on. By discouraging people from seeking out proper healthcare they will be more infectious and less likely to know their HIV status. The casual hookups of things like: grindr, sex on premises venues, beats etc... can be fairly anonymous, so a public register of HIV infected individuals is not exactly going to be the most useful thing anyway.
Disclaimer: I am an HIV epidemiologist.
Rest assured, if you should ever contract it, I'll be personally doing my best to take out double page ads in the Sun to announce it to the world.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Is that a word? I thought a clinic is always a health care institution.
They were also listed in the Ashley Madison database.
HIV is highly communicable under certain circumstances.
If you are referring to the circumstance where someone puts their penis in someone else's body cavity, then yes you're right. But rather than publishing the name of everyone who has been tested positive (which wouldn't reveal the names of any one who HASN'T been tested), why don't you and your latest partner get tested before having sex? If that's too much hassle, then you (or anyone else) are part of the problem - you could be spreading HIV now.
Having a registry of people infected with HIV would allow people to avoid the type of contact that can spread HIV with infected persons.
Once people know that HIV test results are public record, they will choose to not get tested.
That all the patients' details were in an address book mystifies me. I wonder if their addresses were in the same file, and what else? These things are bound to happen given the pressures and distractions of modern life. More precautions are needed where harm may result.
So your position is that the entire country (world maybe) should have access to identity information for everyone who currently has a potentially fatal, communicable disease? Knowing their email addresses would hardly be adequate to help people avoid the problems you describe, so you must (logically) be advocating for revealing actual names and work/home addresses.
Hmmm - so what other diseases should be accorded such special status?
Unless you have some kind of unseemly bias, you must be concerned about all diseases that are at least as communicable as HIV, and which cause at least that number of deaths - would that be a reasonable low bar for you?
So...let's see - in the UK, about 6,000 people die every year from HIV/AIDS - and about 25,000 die from influenza.
Oh [citation required] huh? OK - the numbers are here:
http://www.avert.org/uk-hiv-ai... (6,000 people died from AIDS in 2012)
http://www.theguardian.com/soc... (28,000 people died from influenza in just two weeks in January 2015)
How about communicability?
To be infected by HIV, you need to exchange body fluids - pretty unlikely to happen, statistically.
To be infected by influenza, you just need to be standing nearby when they sneeze - incredibly likely.
So - unless your position comes from a specific bias against HIV sufferers *because* of the most common routes of infection - you should reasonably be pressing the government to release the names of all known influenza sufferers instead.
I think we know what your feelings are in that regard - so we can only conclude from your post that it's pure, unreasoning bias.
www.sjbaker.org
Now everyone knows whose fluids to avoid. How terrible! They should have to tattoo is on their heads if they're found positive. That would stop AIDS in one generation.
Or maybe the H1N1/SARS/Whatever hype accompanied real action to prevent the problem from becoming too big. Just think about the usual muppets screaming that Y2K was hyped up massively and nothing happened - precisely because work was done to stop it becoming so bad.
How long until these get cross-checked with the Ashley Madison hacked records? Data is fun!
And I have a rock that protects me from tiger attacks...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.