this is like, the 1000th time i have submitted this question, and i'm hoping 1000 is my lucky number. situation: i was recently working in a crisis house/shelter. i went into the bathroom approximately 10-15 minutes after one of the patients exited the bathroom to clean up. i noticed there was some water on the counter top, and proceeded to wipe it up with a piece of toilet paper. i inadvertantly swiped my knuckle on the counter top, which had a 2-3 day old paper cut on it, and i believe a scab had started to form. after closer inspection of the piece of toilet paper, i noticed a brownish-red substance on it along with the water. the woman who had left the bathroom before i went in to clean up was a heroin addict coming down off of a recent binge. she had open cuts, sores, and wounds all over her arms and hands. question: would there be any real risk of transmission here, assuming the brownish-red substance was in fact blood? am i just driving myself crazy needlessly? i beg of you to answer this question, because i feel as if my life has stopped because of this situation. thank you.

You're probably driving yourself crazy needlessly since HIV is not transmitted this way. It's important to remember that HIV is only known to be transmitted through the following three ways:

1) Sexual contact: anal, vaginal, and oral sex

2) Blood-to-blood contact: sharing injection needles, occupational exposures, blood transfusions (which is rare in the U.S.). This does not include your hand coming into contact with a small amount of blood(?).

3) Mother-to-infant: either through delivery or during breast feeding

One of the main reasons that HIV is not transmitted through contact with objects in the environment is that HIV does not survive in the environment long, outside of a human host. Scientists found that drying fluids containing very high concentrations of HIV(concentrations that are not normally encountered in day-to-day life) reduced the number of infectious virus by 90% to 99%. It is safe to say, based on these laboratory studies, that HIV would become uninfectious realitively quickly when exposed to the environment, making transmission through indirect contact with another person's fluids remote.

RMK