OFFICERS LOBBY PROVINCE OVER HEPATITIS C, HIV FEARS

REGINA -- In 1986, Sgt. Dale Orban was a six-year constable with the Regina
police when a routine search of a drug house turned his life into a
prolonged and stressful waiting game.

"My part was to go and secure the bathroom area," Orban recalled Thursday.
"As I was running by a table where four people were fixing, I felt a pain
on the top of my left hand."

In the bathroom, he saw the blood and realized he had been pricked --
inadvertently, he thinks, -- by the addicts' shared needle. With HIV a new
and misunderstood threat, Orban spent the next six months waiting for his
blood test to come back from a laboratory and pondering his own mortality.

"It's the worst. Every day, every minute of every day, you're sitting there
thinking, 'Am I going to be the first officer in Regina to be
contaminated?' " He wondered if he was prepared to go on living with AIDS.

He personally tracked down the four users and asked them to get tested.
They did, and their tests, combined with his own, confirmed he was not
infected. One Ottawa officer was not so lucky: she contracted HIV while on
the job in the 1990s.

"Sometimes they spit at you and say 'I've got HIV or Hep C.' It can be used
as a weapon," Orban said.

The issue of on-the-job infection was one of two issues Saskatchewan's
municipal police addressed during their first annual "lobby day" at the
provincial legislature.

Eight representatives from the Saskatchewan Federation of Police Officers
met with MLAs, including Justice Minister Chris Axworthy. Federation
president Evan Bray said nothing was promised during that brief meeting.

The officers want the Justice Department to bring in legislation that
requires someone to undergo a blood test if their bodily fluids contaminate
an officer during a criminal act.

Similar legislation is in place in Ontario, said Bray, a Regina police
officer, who acknowledged the debate will raise concerns about civil liberties.

Infection by blood or spit from suspects and victims alike poses a daily
threat for police officers, Bray said. Officers who think they've been
infected must take a three-month regimen of drugs with side effects ranging
from nausea to liver damage, he said.

The federation also wants to know when the government will fulfill former
Premier Roy Romanow's 1999 promise to fund hiring 200 new officers around
the province. "Right now we are three years after the promise was made and
71 officers have been supplied," Bray said. If those officers don't arrive
in the next year, the federation would at least like to see a detailed plan
to hire them within the "next two or three years."