“Knowledge is power,” or so the saying goes. It means that if you know all the facts then you can incorporate them in all decisions you make and the actions you take. We also have sayings that cover those times when we are missing some essential piece of data or an overview of the whole. We call it “not playing with a full deck” and the like.

This is all well and good speaking hypothetically, but even the most level-headed, sensible person hesitates to deliver bad news, when it’s life-changing or worse, life-threatening.

“Knowledge is power” is hard to find comfort in when faced with raw reality.

This came to mind with the CDC’s recent recommendation to routinely test everyone from 13 to 64 for HIV. Everyone. It seems there are some 250,000 people – they think – who are walking around in the US HIV-positive and don’t even know it.

So the CDC came up with a groundbreaking change in public policy, stating “general consent for medical care should be considered sufficient to encompass consent for HIV testing.” This places HIV testing right in there with all those tests for everything under the sun that your doctor does when he finally gets you to come in for a general check-up.

Science journalist Sabin Russell writes in the San Francisco Chronicle about a program conducted by Dr. Douglas White at Highland Hospital in Oakland. For the last year and a half, they’ve offered free HIV tests to people coming into their emergency room. So far, 8,000 people have taken the oral tests, which takes 20 minutes to bring in a result. And the bottom line? 101 people were found to be HIV-positive. 101 people who wouldn’t otherwise know it.

Not happy news, but the CDC tells us that people who don’t know they are carrying HIV transmit the virus to others at a rate 3.5 (read “three and a half”) times greater than those who are aware of their status. A classic case of “knowledge is power,” Especially coupled with that old reporter’s gem “What did you know? When did you know it? And what did you do once you found out?”

With testing presumably becoming routine, something else was dropped by the wayside – the required pretest counseling session. These sessions made sense when only high-risk folks were being tested, and the pretest counseling set the stage for posttest emotions, behaviors and courses of action.

Which got me to thinking about the program at Highland Hospital. You come in with a sprained ankle, and you leave HIV-positive. Now you can bet that the hospital worked out quickly how to deliver this news and work with the patient from there. But now, every doctor in America is going to have to ready himself or herself for dealing with this, one more thing on their plate that technology has served up.

No doubt from a societal point of view, this is the right step, but from an individual’s point of view, it’s rough. Besides the news itself, there’s always the question of how HIV entered the picture. At a time when marriages need to be their strongest, the specter of betrayal looms large in its own right. When parent-child bonds need to be at their most nurturing, the devastation of hopes and dreams, grief and loss are further complicated with the notion that this all could have been avoided.

Knowledge may be power, but that’s the logical analysis. It doesn’t begin to address the toll in human emotion.

I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.