From Johns Hopkins Medicine site:
While the incidence of disease from HIV and hepatitis is increasing in the United States, little is known about their prevalence in patients undergoing surgery.
Now, researchers have shown that nearly 40 percent of surgeries at The Johns Hopkins Hospital occur in patients who tested positive for a bloodborne germ.
Previous studies have shown that health care workers are injured in about 7 percent of operations.
As many as 87 percent of surgeons will receive an injury that breaks the skin -- thus allowing for possible disease transmission - at some point in their career.
The researchers also found that the operations associated with the greatest risk of infection - lymph-node biopsy, soft-tissue-mass excision and abscess-drainage cases - were often assigned to the most inexperienced surgeons-in-training, placing them at greatest risk.
The researchers found that 38 percent of all operations involved a bloodborne pathogen, and almost half (47 percent) of all men tested positive for at least one infection.
HIV accounted for 26 percent of infections, hepatitis B for 4 percent, hepatitis C for 35 percent, and co-infection with HIV and hepatitis C accounted for 17 percent of infections. In addition, bloodborne pathogen infection was found in up to 65 percent of patients with a history of intravenous drug use and in as many as 71 percent of patients undergoing a soft-tissue abscess procedure or lymph-node biopsy.
http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/Press_releases/2005/05_04_05.html