A spate of cases involving divorced people who are suing former spouses for giving them potentially deadly diseases such as AIDS is throwing up a number of ethic related questions.
Is a person liable for giving a sexually transmitted disease to a partner? What if a person doesn't know if that she or he is infected? What if the person does not know for sure, but has behavioral patterns that increase the risk of infection?
The law states that a person who knows that he or she has an infectious disease and either deliberately or recklessly passes on the infection to another can be civilly, and sometimes criminally, liable.
In one case, the Maine Supreme Judicial Court ruled that a wife who sued her husband for giving her HPV was not entitled to damages because the husband had no symptoms and may not have known he had the disease.
Recently, a jury in Iowa awarded $ 1.5 million to a woman who sued her dentist boyfriend for infecting her with HPV.
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