I am very concerned and I know I have had concerns like this in past but need some reassurance and/or risk perspective. I went to a nail salon today and now realized that I may have complained about this ladies way of waxing before but my regular person was not there and I had forgotten. After she waxed my skin she pressed her hand down onto my skin with her palm. I asked her kindly to stop doing this. What concerns me far more however is when she took the tweezers she used the palm of her hand to literally wipe them/clean them off!! So she kept rubbing them with the palm of her hand if that makes sense. I am really freaked out by this. She then within about 3 seconds used them for taking out my eyebrow hair and I inspected my eyebrows and there were blood spots. So if she had blood on her hand, it then went to the tweezer and then that tweezer was used and pierced and cut my skin which bled, is that a risk? I am also concerned that it was her I had complained about before and maybe she could have intentionally wanted to infect me with something. What if she neglected to clean any of the tools, which I bet she did? I am very panicked. She also seems slightly unkempt, like she may sleep around. Should I take Prep in this scenario? If there is any risk I want to take it.

I'm sorry, but this is yet another irrational question about your continued irrational fears of HIV.

It is a mistake to attempt to imagine scenarios in which HIV may be transmitted by means other than sex or overt blood exposure. Biologically, some of the things you suggest might make sense. But the main fact is that even the busiest HIV/AIDS clinics and research centers have virtually no patients without the traditional risk factors like unprotected sex, needle sharing, or being born to an infected mother. A few newly infected persons cannot initially say how and where s/he was infected, or claim a non-traditional source. In all such cases, it turns out they were being untruthful or they had risks they did not recognize, such as the surprise knowledge that a spouse was at risk (e.g. high risk sex with men but closeted, or a secret IV drug user).

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And I was also wondering about hepatitis c. Please do bear in mind her hand literally squeezed the main part of the tweezer twice and then she used it on me and I bled from tweezer. Hopefully it was the case that she had no fresh cut on her hand but it is always a possibility. There was a day last week I myself had an oozing cut on my palm last week.

One more thing is that Dr Hook wrote a few years ago that if someone was cut by a knife after someone with hiv, there is a high risk, unless water were also involved. I'm not really sure how this would be different. I completely understand your concern regarding my fears and but I would just like a clear medical explanation about the tweezer if blood had been transferred from a cut on her hand.

The case you report isSingle case reports exist for many essentially zero risk events, like this one 5 years ago. The second statement in the article says "the researchers warned that transmission through shared manicure equipment is a 'very rare event' and the risks of infection from new sources are still very low."  The fact that this case even was reported is an indication of how rare such events are. People also get killed by lightning. Does reading about it mean it is likely to happen to you?---