LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) — Adrienne got the news from her fiancé’s ex-wife.

The man Adrienne had been dating and having sex with for five months was infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

And he had not told Adrienne he had HIV.

“I screamed. I cried,” said the 32-year-old Omaha woman, who asked to be identified by only her first name.

Surely, Adrienne thought, she could have her fiancé arrested.

“I called the police and they told me there was nothing that could be done,” she said. “It was not a crime.”

Adrienne turned her rage into a campaign to have a law passed to make it a crime for a person with HIV to have sex without telling their partner they are infected.

That effort recently paid off when Sen. Lowen Kruse of Omaha introduced such a bill (LB872).

“This needs to be a law,” she said. “This is someone taking someone’s life. You are a silent killer. You are not using a gun, you are not using a knife, you are using your body.”

Adrienne said she was tested each month for six months for the HIV virus. The tests came up negative.

“But just because of the fear, I still get tested,” she said.

Kruse’s bill also would make it a crime for a person with HIV to donate blood, sperm, organs or tissue “except as deemed necessary for medical or scientific research.”

It also would make it a crime for a person with HIV to share a needle with another person.

Violating the law would be felony assault, punishable by 20 years in prison and a $25,000 fine.

Kruse said he and his staff worked with the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, an advocacy group, to make sure the bill did not target gays.

“We do not want to hammer anybody — it’s not related to a particular population,” Kruse said

But Hayley Gorenberg, director of the AIDS Project at Lambda Legal, said the group still has problems with the bill.

“All indications are that laws like these don’t change behavior, and they can create an incentive for people not to find out their HIV status and not to get appropriate counseling and treatment,” Gorenberg said. “That leads to more infections. It’s dangerous for public health.”

More than half of all states have some type of law dealing with HIV exposure or transmission, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. At least 20 states have specific bans against infecting someone by engaging in sexual contact.

States can use other laws to prosecute cases of deliberate transmission of the virus, but the statutes require a high burden of proof.

Some statutes in other states address activities like donating blood or engaging in prostitution.

In December, an HIV-infected woman in Jacksonville, Fla., was sentenced to two years in prison for having unprotected sex with more than 200 men.

In November, a Nachez, Miss., man with HIV accused of knowingly infecting women with the virus was indicted on murder charges after one of them died.