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The nation's largest organization of bone and joint surgeons on Friday advised members who are infected with the AIDS virus to inform patients of their infected status and to stop performing surgery except in emergencies. The testing, conducted in conjunction with the Centers for Disease Control, is the first large-scale effort to determine the percentage of surgeons who are infected with the AIDS virus. One problem with the testing is that if surgeons who knew they were infected did not get tested at the meeting, the study might underestimate the real percentage of AIDS infections among the surgeons, [Mary Chamberland] said

Together, doctor, patient and her family thoroughly discussed treatment and suicide options, [Timothy Quill] said. 'A week later, she phoned me with a request for barbiturate for sleep,' Quill wrote, adding, 'I knew this was an essential ingredient in a Hemlock Society suicide. [Diane] said tearful goodbyes to her closest friends and to Quill. Two days later, her husband called Quill to say that Diane said her final goodbyes to him and their college-age son that morning and died peacefully after asking them to leave her alone for an hour

In a report in the New England Journal of Medicine, Rochester NY physician Timothy E. Quill told how he prescribed that barbiturates that a 45-year-old female patient needed to kill herself after she refused treatment for a severe form of leukemia

[Diane] had lost friends and family members who had gone through chemotherapy and treatments and who, in her eyes, had very unpleasant deaths, [Timothy Quill] said. ''Her belief was that it was outrageous that our society wouldn't allow' people to end their lives in a humane way, he said. Diane said tearful good-bys to her closest friends and to Quill. Two days later, her husband called Quill to say that she had said her final good-bys to him and their college-age son that morning and died peacefully after asking them to leave her alone for an hour. Quill said he told the medical examiner that Diane died of acute leukemia but withheld information about barbiturates to spare the family any police investigation

In the first direct comparison of the drugs used to dissolve blood clots when a patient is having a heart attack, researchers have found that all three are equally effective in saving lives, but the oldest and cheapest, streptokinase, is the safest

A potentially devastating complication of the treatment is bleeding, and TPA and Eminase caused a small but statistically significant greater number of strokes from bleeding into the brain than streptokinase. The frequency of strokes from bleeding into the brain was 3 per 1,000 patients treated with streptokinase and 6 per 1,000 with Eminase and 7 per 1,000 with TPA. Though the risk of excess strokes seems small, the difference was more marked than expected, and would translate into about 800 strokes among the 200,000 US heart-attack patients who receive TPA each year, said Dr. Richard Peto, an Oxford author

A pigment in red blood cells, heme, slows the growth of the AIDS virus in the test tube and strengthens the action of AZT, the chief drug against the disease, researchers reported

The FDA has approved the first US tests of a purified blood product from cattle. If successful, the test could lead to safer and cheaper blood transfusions

The Food and Drug Administration has approved the first U.S. tests in human beings of a purified blood product from cattle. If successful, the experiments could lead to safer and cheaper blood transfusions for accident victims, war casualties and hospital patients. The initial studies are aimed solely at determining the safety of using the cattle hemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying protein in red blood cells, officials of the agency and the product's manufacturer, Biopure Corp. of Boston, said yesterday. Biopure makes the purified cattle hemoglobin under the trade name Hemopure. The experiments are expected to begin in about two weeks with the injection of small amounts of purified cattle hemoglobin and to continue in about 25 volunteers for several months under the supervision of Upjohn Co., which signed a marketing agreement with Biopure in December. The results will be used to determine whether to progress to injections of larger amounts. If no significant adverse reactions occur, the trials will then be expanded to determine the effectiveness of the product. ADVANTAGES The blood substitute would be free of the AIDS virus and many microbes that cannot be eliminated at present from human blood. Testing and observation of herds of cattle presumably would minimize the transfer of bovine microbes, Biopure officials said. About 12 million pints of blood are used in transfusions every year in the United States