Recovery of HIV at Autopsy

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…