OAKLAND, Calif., Aug. 28 (UPI) -- A California man whose doctor told him eight years ago he had the human immunodeficiency virus is actually not HIV positive and plans to sue over the mistake.
Jim Malone, 56, learned only this month that all his health worries for the last eight years have been misplaced, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Saturday.
On Aug. 4 Malone's Veterans Affairs physician, Dr. Richard Karp, wrote a letter in which he admitted the error and accepted blame.
A spokeswoman for VA's Northern California Health Care System, which has eight clinics and a medical center and serves more than 65,000 patients, said Malone arrived at the clinic in 1996 with lab results from an outside testing firm in southern California.
Those results showed he was HIV positive. The VA did its own confirmatory HIV test on Malone and found he was negative, but somehow those test results were never communicated to Malone, a former clerk-typist with the Army, the Chronicle said.
Malone, who was not placed on AIDS medication because his routinely tested blood work was fine, has hired a lawyer to sue the VA.
