Sometimes kids bleed. It’s a fact of life. A family might worry about being exposed to an HIV positive child's blood and whether that puts them at risk. Thankfully, “accidental” transmission of HIV through any means other than the 3 main methods sited by the Center for Disease Control (sex/needle sharing/birth-breast feeding) is extremely rare. Far less common, in fact, than accidental death or paralysis from swimming, horseback riding, backyard trampoline and car accidents.
Statistically you are 287 TIMES more likely to be STRUCK DEAD by LIGHTNING1 than accidentally contract HIV in a household setting.
To put it in perspective, in the U.S. 93 people die EVERY DAY in car accidents3, 10 every day in swimming accidents1, 8 people die every day in fire related accidents4, 2 from choking4, and even an average of 2 people die every WEEK from being struck by lightning!1 And yet over the past 28 YEARS that HIV/AIDS has been carefully tracked by the Centers for Disease Control, there have been only 8 reported cases of accidental household transmission. 8 in 28 YEARS.
(Among those 8 cases were hemophiliac brothers sharing razors, some elderly women, caring for their dying adult children who had full blown AIDS, not using simple universal precautions for years, and some individuals living in bizarrely unsanitary conditions (open wounds, used bandages laying all over the house, etc) further proving that under ‘normal’ household conditions, the virus is almost impossible to pass.)
Perhaps most notably, there have been no further cases since 1994, likely due to vast changes in the ratio of people w/ AIDS vs. HIV and the life altering improvements in medicine which have drastically lessened the viral load and thus the transmission capacity of HIV+ individuals. Since the introduction of the currently used drug regime (ARVs) 16 years ago, there have not been ANY cases of household transmission.
Many children who are on medication today have a medically defined ‘undetectable’ amount of HIV in their blood and, thus, their odds of transmission are even many times more unlikely than these already EXTREMELY low numbers!2
If a blood spill accident does occur, simple universal precautions (wearing gloves when wiping up spills, properly disposing of waste) are all that is needed.
The only difference between handling the scraped knee of an HIV+ child versus a negative child is basically a pair of plastic gloves.