Thanks to last week’s Supreme Court decision, Dr. Randon Bragdon of Bangor will spend the rest of his life joined at the hip by the nom de plume, “Maine AIDS dentist.”

The high court, by a 5-4 decision, ruled that Bragdon could be sued for discrimination because in 1994 he insisted on treating Sidney Abbott, a Brewer woman who has tested HIV positive, at a hospital operating room instead of in his office. Justices asked the 1st Circuit Court in Boston to determine whether the dentist’s concern about medical safety was excessive, or well-grounded.

AIDS activists have characterized Bragdon as homophobic. Bill Nemitz, a Maine Sunday Telegram columnist, concluded from a 30-minute interview that the Bangor dentist, who once worked for a military contractor that dealt with lethal biological and chemical agents, dances on the “edges of paranoia.”

“Poor man. If only someone could sit him down and explain that it’s 1998 — and we’re talking basic dentistry here. Not biological warfare,” Nemitz wrote.

The notion that Randon Bragdon is a frightened old bigot fits conveniently into the politically correct notion of AIDS — which is although the disease is the medical scourge of the millennia, those who suffer from the infection by law cannot be segregated under the banner of public safety in ways that diminish their civil rights.

This view conveniently overlooks the first “AIDS dentist,” a Florida practitioner named David Acer. If one accepts the argument put forth by the U.S. Justice Department and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before the Supreme Court, there has not been a single provable case of a dental worker contracting AIDS from treating an HIV-positive patient.

The paradox of Dr. Acer, however, has caused many like Randon Bragdon to doubt the CDC assessment. David Acer died of AIDS in 1990. According to the CDC, Acer informed local medical review boards upon learning of his infection and followed their recommendations about safeguarding against an accidental transmission. He wrote a letter to all his patients urging that they be tested for AIDS.

Despite those precautions, six of Dr. Acer’s patients contracted AIDS and eventually died. One of them, a young coed named Kimberly Bergalis, claimed to have been a virgin who never used intravenous drugs. She wrote a letter to the Miami Herald blaming “every single one of you bastards” who permitted David Acer to continue practicing dentistry.

The initial response of CDC investigators was to attempt to prove Bergalis lied about not being sexually active and that she contracted AIDS from an undisclosed lover. She was, after all, an attractive 23-year-old college student. A DNA analysis that matched Acer’s HIV strain to the one that killed Bergalis ended that debate, however.

The search for a new villain commenced.

Dr. Leonard Horowitz, a Harvard researcher, published a study concluding that David Acer fit the profile of a serial killer and most likely attempted to murder his patients “in retaliation against the U.S. Public Health and the (CDC).” Horowitz said there was some evidence Acer believed both agencies were responsible for infecting homosexuals with AIDS during an experimental hepatitis B vaccination program in the late 1970s.

The paradox is this.

The CDC has concluded that an AIDS-infected dentist, who seemingly followed proper procedures, passed the deadly disease on to six of his patients. At the same time, however, the agency argues with total conviction that small-town dentists like Randon Bragdon are in no danger from an accidental infection if they follow the same procedures.

What if the CDC is wrong?

The national health agencies of France and Japan, it should be pointed out, made similar blanket assurances during the early 1980s that their national blood banks had not been contaminated by AIDS. This miscalculation, which was initially covered up by bureaucrats, resulted in the deaths of thousands of hemophiliacs.

There’s an interesting postscript to Florida AIDS dentist story. Last October a group in Ocala, Fla., invited the parents of Kimberly Bergalis to view the play, “Patient A,” which is based on the death of their daughter. David Schlenker, a columnist for the Ocala Star-Banner who covered the event, said the couple stunned the mostly AIDS activist audience by advocating the mandatory testing of all health care workers in a question-and-answer session after the performance.

The head of the local AIDS network, who invited the couple to Ocala, thereupon publicly denounced the grieving parents for “setting us back 15 to 20 years” with “dangerous misinformation” about the transmission of the HIV virus.

God knows, we must stamp out this foolish “paranoia.”

John Day is a Bangor Daily News columnist based in Washington, D.C. His e-mail address is zanadume@aol.com.