Minister the Hon. Quinton Edness indicated yesterday.

The Minister was responding to overseas reports of a recommendation by doctors at the US Centres for Disease Control for routine AIDS testing of hospital patients.

The recommendation, which is to be published today in the New England Journal of Medicine, says testing could identify many more people infected with the virus who don't know it.

Doctors say the idea behind the testing is to find infected people early so they can benefit from early treatement and guard against infecting others. The plan would be to "target test'' people from specific age groups at hospitals where AIDS is prevalent.

Mr. Edness, who is expected today or tomorrow to publicly quash the idea of mandatory AIDS testing in the prisons, declined to comment on the specifics of the news reports.

"I can't comment because I don't know the contents of the doctors' report,'' he said. "But if it's mandatory (testing), it's not within our policy. If it's mandatory, then I don't agree with it.'' The question of mandatory testing in the prisons became an issue recently after criminologist Mrs. Sheelagh Cooper claimed that 60 percent of Casemates prisoners may carry the HIV virus.

She called for the adoption of a wholesale testing programme for prisoners using incentives to ensure that all participate in it.

HIV testing in Bermuda has always been voluntary, in both the prisons and hospitals.

Testing programmes have been set up to screen patients undergoing surgery and participants in sexually transmitted disease clinics. Also, pregnant women have access to testing. Chief medical officer Dr. John Cann said there has been 100 percent compliance with pre-natal testing.

"Mandatory testing goes against almost all the international agreements on AIDS,'' Dr. Cann said.

The article to appear today said in 1990, 225,000 HIV-infected people were cared for in 5,558 US hospitals. It said if all 25 million patients were tested, 163,000 with unsuspected infections would have been identified.