Abstract
To the Editor:
Thank you for allowing us to respond to the comments from Tin & Wiwanitkit pertaining to our article “Needlestick and Sharps Injuries Among Nurses at a Teaching Hospital in China” (Zhang et al., 2015).
We agree that the strategy for calculating the risk of HIV infection from needlestick injuries is worthy of further study and is a significant concern when studying the incidence and prevalence of these injuries. The authors of the letter (Tin & Wiwanitkit, 2015) used data from the 1990s in the United States (Henry & Campbell, 1995) to compute the likelihood of HIV infection from needlestick injuries reported from one teaching hospital in China conducted in 2012. The use of data from hospitals in the United States to estimate HIV exposure in China is not likely to provide a valid estimate. Base rates of HIV infection will strongly influence the risk of exposure but need to be linked to the target community. In addition, seroconversion rates among United States health care workers exposed to HIV infected blood between 1983 and 1992 (Tokars et al., 1993) are unlikely to reflect the experience of workers in one teaching hospital in China in 2012. Therefore, although we believe in continued monitoring using the logic presented in the letter to the editor to assess the risk of HIV seroconversion among nurses in China, we do not believe that the computations that were presented are likely to be valid estimates of the risk of HIV-infected blood transmission in China.