@Lightwizard,
There was no "out of his way" and if you can find a factual link, lead me to it, other than some nutcase blog conspiracy theorist.
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Oh one point HIV only survive for a very short time in open air ten of minutes or so if memory service me correctly so dry blood on instruments would not do it!
Selections from New York Times Dec 19, 2008
possible motive was suggested by Edward Parsons, a nurse who was a friend of Dr. Acer. He told The Palm Beach Post last year that Dr. Acer had said to him in 1988 that mainstream America was ignoring AIDS because it affected mostly homosexuals like himself, hemophiliacs and drug addicts. "When it starts affecting grandmothers and younger people, then you'll see something done," Mr. Parsons said Dr. Acer told him.
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Acer knew he was infected as early as 1986. The six patients, all of whom were probably infected by mid-1988, include four women and two men ranging in age from about 15 to about 65.
There are several ways he might have infected them, accidentally or deliberately.
The initial assumption was that his equipment had blood on it, passing the virus from him to patients or from patient to patient. But the investigating team virtually ruled that out.
All the strains of the virus are the same as his.
No pattern in the dates of appointments is apparent; as far as can be told from Dr. Acer's records, no more than two of the infected patients were ever in his office on the same day. When they were, it seemed unlikely the same instruments would have been used on them.
Investigators said Dr. Acer did not always sterilize his equipment but that he was no more sloppy than other dentists in the area.
A second theory is that he accidentally cut his own finger while working and bled into his patients' mouths, or jabbed himself with a hypodermic without noticing it and injected his blood along with the anesthetic.
But that explanation has been weakened by the latest case; the teen-ager only had fillings done, something unlikely to cut a dentist's fingers. The others had extractions, crown placement or other invasive work.
Many AIDS patients suffer nerve damage in their fingers; but Dr. Acer's medical records do not show that he had.
Moreover, no infected patient or office worker recalled Dr. Acer hurting himself that way, and no one suggested that he suffered AIDS-induced dementia that would have led him to ignore injuries.
"It seems very unlikely that these patients could have been infected simply by having a drop of Dr. Acer's blood falling into their mouths," Dr. Jaffe said.
Transmission through sex or rape was ruled out -- his infected patients denied having sex with him and none were under general anesthesia.
Another possibility is that Dr. Acer used instruments on himself, say at lunchtime, then did not sterilize them. No staff member reported seeing him do so -- and the idea seems a little far-fetched. It's not easy to do dental work on oneself.
If Dr. Acer did it deliberately, he has outwitted his investigators. They cannot figure out how.
Almost certainly, he would have had to inject patients with his own blood. The Case Against
His staff said he used a fresh vial of clear-colored lidocaine -- a local anesthetic injected in the gums -- for each patient. No one noticed a reddish tinge to it. No one noticed any second hypodermics that might have contained blood or other infectious fluids. His staff said nothing in his behavior made them suspicious.
And even if he did inject blood, epidemiologists are baffled by his success rate. Health-care workers have been infected by accidental needle sticks while treating AIDS patients -- but studies have shown that only about one stick in 300 transmits the infection.
Anecdotes have been cited of some AIDS victims who were so furious at having contracted the disease that they seduced other people and then taunted that that they'd passed on the infection. But no one suggested that Dr. Acer harbored such anger. He kept his homosexuality largely secret, but that may not be surprising in a city of under 10,000 people.
And Dr. Acer's friends and colleagues said he was -- as he described himself -- a gentle man, and they could not believe he would have knowingly infected patients.
He cooperated with investigators, giving them a blood sample when asked, knowing that new molecular tests would show whether his patients had the same H.I.V. strain he did.
Some have suggested that his strain was unusually virulent or that his blood unusually full of the virus. But virulence can't be tested in fatal human infections, and tests for virus concentrations weren't performed.
In a way, the Acer case was a long time coming.
Infectious disease experts had predicted that a health worker would someday give AIDS to a patient, because it has happened with hepatitis B, a liver-damaging virus spread, like AIDS, through blood or semen.
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The National AIDS Commission never held a session to discuss deliberate infection. Its co-chairman, Dr. David E. Rogers, who is a critic of attempts to restrict the practice of H.I.V.-infected health workers, said he now believes the omission was a serious mistake.
"It is so unthinkable to view another health professional as doing something dastardly that I guess I shied away from it," Dr. Rogers said. "But it certainly should have been on the table. It is a perfectly logical reason for not promulgating those Draconian solutions."
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