The ethics of contact tracing programs and their implications for women.

Partner notification and contact tracing are well-established public health interventions designed to reduce the incidence of new cases of sexually transmitted diseases. The idea behind such programs is to inform the sexual and drug-using contacts of infected patients of their potential exposure so that the chain of infection can be broken. After researchers discovered that HIV could be transmitted sexually, there were calls to implement partner notification and/or contact tracing programs as public health interventions. While there have been several analyses of whether partner notification programs are appro-