COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) – South Carolina schools will continue to be notified when students test positive for HIV following a governor’s veto that brought warnings from critics who contend requiring the notice will dissuade people from seeking medical testing.

Gov. Mark Sanford issued the veto June 12, saying federal privacy laws are flawed and ending notification to school superintendents and nurses is a step in the wrong direction. He said Hepatitis B and C should be added to the notifications.

“We believe that as a matter of public policy that more highly contagious diseases should be added to this notification list rather than deleted. Instead, this bill would move in the opposite direction by removing what many consider to be a very deadly disease,” Sanford wrote. “If my son or daughter was sitting in class or was on the sporting field with a fellow student who happened to have Hepatitis C, as a parent I would want to know.”

Critics said sending HIV test results to schools discourages students from being screened and runs afoul of federal laws.

Casting concerns about HIV and Hepatitis C in the context of classroom or sport event “shows a misunderstanding of the transmission of HIV, a misunderstanding or lack of knowledge of how one acquires HIV,” said Dr. Jacob White, deputy director of the South Carolina HIV/AIDS Council.

“This is not a disease you can get by sitting next to somebody in class,” said Sen. Brad Hutto, D-Orangeburg, the bill’s sponsor.

Sanford spokesman Joel Sawyer said the governor knows how HIV is transmitted.

White said the South Carolina notification law and others like it were written when AIDS and HIV fears were at their height in the 1980s, before there was widespread understanding that the virus that causes AIDS is spread through sexual contact, sharing needles with an infected person or through a transfusion of tainted blood.

Health care professionals long ago adopted “universal precautions” when dealing with injuries involving blood or bodily floods that protect them and the public from unknown infections, White said. Those standards protect students and the public.

Physicians say students referred to health clinics for HIV tests don’t go because they don’t want results reported back to schools, Hutto and White said.

“If they won’t seek treatment, HIV and AIDS will continue to spread unchecked,” Hutto said.

The state Department of Health and Environmental Control runs health clinics and should be the only place holding that information, Hutto said. “Schools are not the proper repository of that kind of information,” he said.