Abstract

As is so often the case in a common law system, the legal protection conferred by one strand of law is undermined by other legal provisions. There is no blanket legal duty which compels health care professionals to undergo HIV/AIDS tests; on the other hand, appropriately drafted contracts of employment, duties imposed by courts on employees and the risk of litigation by patients with pressurise individual workers to submit to testing. Whereas in Italy the law clearly condemned any compulsory testing of health care workeers, but must now be interpreted to support it, in England and Wales each individual worker's case must be examined in order to determine whether testing must be submitted to.