My young sons get their hair cut often at a public salon. Sometimes, the barber gets too close with the clippers and scrapes, sometimes even cuts, their skin so that blood is drawn. Is there an HIV risk here? We have no idea how many people those clippers have been in contact with, or how much blood gets on them. We have bought our own clippers and I have tried to cut their hair myself, but I do a terrible job. What is the general consensus regarding clippers/shavers in a public salon? I KNOW the barber is too busy to clean his clippers every time. I've never seen him do it.

S.H.

I will say that this is a very difficult question, and I am not sure you will like my answer. Every time I go the barber, I think about the same issues that you mention: Can I get HIV? I hope he doesn't nick my skin. Who was the client immediately preceding me?

The risk of getting HIV (the virus that causes AIDS) from such a setting is very low. There have been few, if any, documented cases of transmission of HIV in the personal-services setting, such as hair or nail salons. There are several reasons for the very low risk. First, there are few people in the United States, percentage-wise, who are HIV-infected. For transmission to occur, a person with the virus would have to contaminate the razor with his blood, and then you would have to get cut with the same razor soon thereafter. Second, the virus itself does not survive long in the environment. Soon after the body fluid containing HIV dries, the virus is no longer infectious.

That said, the risk of infection at a barbershop is probably not zero. While there are no proven cases of HIV spread in this fashion, there are many cases where the means of transmission is not known for certain. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has recommended that personal-service workers who use instruments designed to pierce the skin (such as tattoo needles and ear-piercing devices) should discard them after one use or thoroughly clean and sterilize the instruments each time they are used. The same recommendation is made for devices not designed to penetrate the skin but which may become contaminated with blood, such as razors and clippers. I can tell you that barbers in the community rarely carry out this recommendation. Fortunately, the risk, even without thorough cleaning of the instruments, is very low.