After 14 years of the terrifying asthma attacks that have plagued her son since infancy, Patricia Wooten, 31, of Dorchester has become a pro at triage – the fine art of distinguishing between life-and-death emergencies and scary, but less urgent, medical problems.

She has learned how to listen to James’ wheezing through a stethoscope and determine, with help from a doctor on the phone, whether it’s safe to increase his medications and handle things at home.

And she knows when to call 911 or to rush James to Boston Medical Center’s emergency room herself, zooming through traffic in 15 minutes flat.

But many parents, especially those with less experience than Wooten, aren’t sure which emergencies – from asthma to epileptic seizures to high fevers to bad falls – require a fast trip to the ER, and which ones can be handled by phone, in the doctor’s office or in the urgent care unit of a health maintenance organization.

And new research suggests that guessing wrong may be more dangerous than you may think. Pediatricians’ offices are often not equipped to handle emergencies because doctors think emergencies are rarer than they really are.

In a recent survey of 52 pediatric practices in Connecticut, for instance, researchers found that the average pediatric practice faces one emergency every other week – and that one quarter face an emergency every week.

Yet few pediatricians or their staffs are certified in basic or advanced life support techniques. And they often lack the necesssary equipment – oxygen, intravenous tubing, masks and bags to pump air into the lungs, says Dr. Glenn Flores, a Boston Medical Center pediatrician who was the study’s lead author.

While most pediatricians’ offices can handle a typical asthma crisis, Flores says, a third or fewer are prepared for other emergencies, such as upper airway obstruction, shock, trauma, epileptic seizure, cardiac arrest or a diabetic crisis.

Dr. George Foltin, director of pediatric emergency medicine at Bellevue Hospital in New York, emphatically agrees, noting that one third to 40 percent of all pediatricians and family practitioners are not ready for respiratory emergencies.

“And maybe 50 percent are not ready for other kinds of emergencies,” adds Foltin, a member of the pediatric emergency medicine committee of the American Academy of Pediatrics, which is holding its annual meeting this week in Boston.

Granted, it makes little sense, especially in or near a big city, for every pediatrician’s office to be as prepared for an emergency as a big hospital pediatric emergency unit.

“The average city police department doesn’t have a tank and an F-18, because they don’t usually use them,” says Dr. Gary Fleisher, chief of emergency medicine at Children’s Hospital. He argues that at least for urban pediatricians, often the best preparation “is to have a telephone so he can call 911.”

Still, there’s a lot that parents themselves can do to make sure their child gets the right care fast in an emergency.

The key is to discuss with your child’s pediatrician – before an emergency arises – when you should call 911 or the police emergency number to have the child rushed to a hospital, when to drive the child to an emergency room yourself, which hospital to go to – and when to triage problems by phone with the help of a doctor or nurse.

All this can get rather tricky, but a rough consensus emerged from interviews with several leading pediatric emergency specialists, among them, Dr. Martin Horowitz, director of pediatrics for the health center division of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care; Dr. Bob Vinci, director of the pediatric emergency department at Boston Medical Center; Dr. Suzanna Steinbach, director of the pediatric asthma clinic at BMC; Flores of BMC and Fleisher of Children’s.

Here’s what they said:

The scene: New Zealand, a wilderness area along the coast.

The protagonist: A wet, half-naked Las Vegas psychologist named Jeffrey A. Kottler who was near death from hypothermia, having just waded across an icy bay, his clothes and pack on his head, during a solo trek that rangers said should be safe.

The plot: A dramatic rescue by hikers who dragged him to a hut, poured hot liquids into him and warmed the still-unconscious Kottler with their own body heat.

The surprise ending: Survival – and a 12-hour crying jag as Kottler imagined the pain his death would have caused his family.

That bout of tears changed his life, Kottler says, and led him to write an intriguing new book, “The Language of Tears,” on men, women and the mysteries of crying.

Aside from a very few, unconfirmed reports in animals – an Indian elephant here, an African gorilla there – humans are believed to be the only animals who shed tears when they are sad, joyous, angry, scared or otherwise overwhelmed by emotion.

Yet scientists know frustratingly little about whether there are differences between emotional tears and tears that just lubricate the eye, about differences between men’s and women’s tears or about their possible evolutionary role, like ridding the body of stress hormones or signalling submission to ward off an attacker.

Even psychologists, who spend their lives listening to people in tears, haven’t given much rigorous thought to tears, until recently.

All of which is a crying shame, says Kottler, who says ever since his epiphany Down Under, he has been fascinated by tears and has become – gasp – a man who is now moved to tears “very easily – and I am proud of that. It’s really cool.”

In fact, tears are increasingly cool, scientifically and politically.

Only a generation ago, Ed Muskie blew his 1972 presidential hopes by shedding a tear about a critical news report on his wife. Less than a decade ago, Colorado Congresswoman Pat Schroeder got endless grief for crying when she quit her presidential run in 1987.

Yet today, both Bill Clinton and Bob Dole seem so comfortable blubbering in public – dare one say “on cue?” – that the Wall Street Journal dubbed this campaign the “weepiest on record,” with only iron-man Ross Perot eschewing the snivels.

But it is not tearfully correct politics that fascinates researchers, but the makeup and function of tears. For more than a decade, the nation’s chief tear guru has been biochemist William Frey II, research director of the Ramsay Dry Eye and Tear Research Center in St. Paul.

Frey, who started studying tears at his mother’s suggestion, and others have uncovered a number of teary tidbits, to wit:

Adults sob only once in every dozen crying episodes.

Emotional tears contain more proteins than “irritant” tears, the kind you shed while slicing onions. Though Frey thinks this means that “something unique happens when people cry emotional tears,” other scientists have their doubts.

Both emotional and irritant tears contain 30 times more manganese than is found in blood, suggesting that human tear glands can concentrate and remove substances from the body. (In sea birds like gulls, albatrosses and cormorants, tear glands are more powerful than kidneys at removing toxic levels of salt from the body.)

About 85 percent of women and 73 percent of men say they feel better after crying, suggesting, says Frey, that “tears help remove chemicals that build up during stress.”

Women – surprise, surprise – cry four times more often than men, averaging 5.3 cries a month.

When men do cry, people may not even notice because male tears usually mean brimming eyes, not streams of tears cascading down the cheeks. “We cry, too,” says Kottler, “but women don’t understand it. Women think it’s not legitimate because we don’t make a lot of noise.”

Men’s and women’s tear glands are structurally different.

Yet nobody knows whether men’s and women’s tears are chemically different. Research does show that before puberty, boys and girls cry the same amount, but by age 18, women cry substantially more.

One obvious explanation is that boys may be told so often that real men don’t cry that they learn not to – a most regrettable phenomenon, as both Frey and Kottler see it.

But hormonal changes at puberty may also be involved. No one knows what effect, if any, estrogen may play in tearfulness, but data suggest that prolactin, a hormone that promotes secretion of milk and controls fluid balance. By age 18, women have 60 percent more prolactin than men.

Other biological processes may also influence production or composition of tears, though nobody has yet found precise links between changes in emotional state or specific biochemical changes in the brain and what gets secreted in tears.

Still, studies have shown that tears are triggered by nerves that pump out chemical messengers near tear glands and by circulating hormones, says physiologist Darlene Dartt, senior scientist at the Schepens Eye Research Institute in Boston.

Neurotransmitters like VIP and ACH, which have other, well-documented roles as chemical messengers, clearly trigger tears, she says, as do some pituitary hormones.

“There’s no question that specific biological pathways lead to emotional tears,” adds Dartt, “but we still don’t know which is more important – hormones or chemical messengers from nerves.”

Whatever the genesis of emotional tears, it’s long been known that everyday tears form a three-layered film that lubricates the eye. The mucin layer, closest to the eye’s surface, is made in the eyelid and on the surface of the eye; the aqueous or watery middle layer is made in the lacrimal gland above the eye; and the oily, top layer is made in the meibomian gland in the eyelid.

Normally, this three-tiered film protects the eye well.

But 10 million Americans, most of them women, do not make enough tears, a painful condition called “dry eye,” says endocrinologist David Sullivan, a senior scientist at Schepens.

In women, dry eye is often caused by Sjogren’s syndrome, a disease in which the body’s own antibodies attack the lacrimal gland, causing a shortage of aqueous tears.

In both men and women, dry eye can also result from a malfunctioning meibomian gland, producing too few oily tears.

Aging seems to make things worse, perhaps because the male hormone androgen seems to have something to do with tear formation, and both men and women have less of it as they get older. Many women get dry eye during menopause, when several hormones, including prolactin, also drop.

While over-the-counter “artificial tears” help keep eyes moist, using androgen eyedrops may work better, says Sullivan, who is testing the drops in patients now.

But tears do much more than keep eyeballs moist. They are a potent, if often misunderstood, mode of communication.

“There isn’t another form of emotional expression that can communicate so much,” says Kottler. “We can cry when we’re sad, despairing, depressed, sentimental, joyful, frustrated, angry, relieved, anxious or having an esthetic experience.”

Tears are so “riveting,” he adds, that “things stop” when someone starts to cry, because tears lend power and authenticity to whatever a person is doing or saying.

Just how easy it is to conjure up tears to manipulate people remains a subject of hot debate, as is the delicate matter of crying on the job (not on purpose), a common female fear.

What is clear, says Kottler, is that you can get better at dealing with tears, both your own and other people’s.

When someone starts to cry, the first step, he says, is to simply listen and perhaps touch or hold the person, if he or she indicates that that would be welcome.

“Men make the mistake, when women cry, of responding by saying, ‘What’s the problem? Let’s fix it.’ “

But listening is not enough. “The second part is encouraging some sort of verbal elaboration” – asking what the tears mean.

“You have to help people elaborate what’s going on inside,” he says. “People who are depressed cry all the time and feel worse,” he says, because depression is a kind of immobilized state, while sadness, once understood, can be “an intense feeling of being alive.”

The real key, he says, is this: “If crying brings you closer to other people, it’s good. If it pushes people away, it’s bad.”

For the last five years, Joyce Antler, a Brandeis University historian in her early 50s, has been living what she calls “a terrible nightmare.”

Antler lives in Brookline and is trying to manage the care of her increasingly demented, 84-year-old mother – long distance.

At first, the solution seemed to be to have her mother move up from Florida to live with Antler and her family, but within a month, she says, her mother “found it impossible because we were so busy. She felt like a fifth wheel.”

So Antler’s sister gave up her apartment in New York to move back to Florida with their mother. But this has proved only marginally better, Antler says, because her sister has serious medical problems of her own.

The result is ever more frequent – not to mention expensive – plane trips to Florida, endless telephone calls to help her sister manage crises and “semi-crises” and a lot of guilt.

Antler’s dilemma is the tip of a huge iceberg that, some worry, could come close to sinking the Great Ship Baby Boomer.

In fact, if you’re among America’s 76 million boomers – born between 1946 and 1964 – and you thought finding child care was a colossal hassle, you are about to get smacked between the eyes with an even bigger problem, if you haven’t been already.

Call it the geographic crunch. Suitcase caregiving. Long-distance care management. By whatever name, managing the care of a frail or disabled parent, especially from far away, is, as Antler says, a true nightmare, and one that will almost certainly get worse as boomers and their parents age.

Many older people, of course, are willing to make a final move to assisted living or a nursing home when it looks as though they will no longer be able to manage things at home.

But most want to live out their lives in their own homes, with the right kind of help – nursing services, home health aides and someone to help with errands, housekeeping and yard work.

The trouble with that, however, is that while services are available, especially for those who can pay for them, finding them usually means cutting through miles of red tape.

That is tough enough to do if your parents live next door, and it can be “truly overwhelming” if they don’t, says Scott Bass, dean of the graduate school at the University of Maryland/Baltimore County.

Although most people over 65 live within an hour’s drive of at least one child, an estimated 7 to 9 million aging parents do not, says gerontologist Merril Silverstein of the University of Southern California.

And that gap could get worse.

Currently, 2 million working Americans – most of them women – help older relatives with activities of daily life. But the “greater geographic dispersion of families, smaller family sizes and the large percentage of women who work outside the home are straining the capacity of this care source,” the government’s General Accounting Office noted in 1994.

While hands-on care – bathing, shopping, giving medications – is the most demanding help that children can provide to aging parents, the managerial stuff – the hours on the phone arranging or monitoring help given by others – is no small task.

In fact, lining up care for aging parents is “much more complicated than setting up child care for kids,” says Dorothy Howe, acting manager of health advocacy services for the American Association of Retired Persons in Washington.

For one thing, “you’re not dealing with a dependent,” says gerontologist Bass. “You don’t have the authority, necessarily, to intervene.” Added to that is an often complex family history, sibling disputes over who should help how – and distance.

It adds up to “a very, very stressful, difficult issue,” says Bass, who adds that even “experts in gerontology are absolutely drained by the experience of traveling back and forth” to help manage parents’ care.

“Are you kidding?,” he says. “You call state agencies and you get a recording. Or someone’s not helpful. Or it’s the wrong number. . . . This is probably the hardest thing a family can go through. It defies the complexity of what people experience with children.”

Al Norman, executive director of Mass Home Care, a consumer organization for the elderly, couldn’t agree more: “I found this out personally – and I am in the business.”

When his mother needed help for his father, who had Parkinson’s disease, Norman had “a devil of a time trying to just locate an area agency on aging in Maryland. . . . We never did find the right service for overnight care.”

And John Paul Marosy, a specialist on elder care issues and president of a consulting business, HM Associates in Belmont, tells a similar tale.

“I’ve been in home care for 20 years and nothing in my professional dealings with the elder service system prepared me for the complexity and emotional impact of trying to arrange care for my own father,” says Marosy, who was moving to Massachusetts when his father was diagnosed with cancer in New Jersey.

“I would argue that for baby boomers, the next role for radical activity is making sure the elder service system works for our parents so it will work for us when we get older. This is a real wake-up call.”

And there are signs the system is beginning to wake up.

Business is booming, for instance, at Work Family Directions, Inc. in Boston, the biggest player in the “work-life industry,” which helps employees balance work and family needs.

Work Family serves 2.5 million employees nationwide from companies like Digital, Gillette and Bank of Boston, says regional manager Diane Piktialis, 30 to 40 percent of whom need help with long distance caregiving of parents. Other groups like Elderlink in Somerville and WarmLines in Newton do likewise for employees of organizations like Wellesley and Babson College.

Diana Harrington, for instance, a Babson College professor of finance who is in her fifties, turned to WarmLines to find services for her mother in Virginia and her mother and father-in-law in West Palm Beach, Fla.

Trying to set up care from afar is “horrible, terrible,” she says. “You don’t have a clue where to start. I don’t even have a West Palm Beach phone book.” But WarmLines, which works with West Suburban Elder Services, helped, she says.

Even when a parent is able to find services on her own, it may still be worthwhile to do your own research to offer additional options, says Barbara Levitov, director of special events at WGBH-TV. At the very least, says Levitov, who sought help from Elderlink, having your own suggestions can help you “start having a real conversation” with your parent.

If you don’t work for a company that provides these kinds of services, you can plunge in yourself by calling local or state agencies on aging where your parent lives.

If you’re getting nowhere and can afford it, you can hire a geriatric care manager who should come up with options much faster than you can. So far, there is no national certification for professional care managers, though most are social workers or nurses. It costs $ 200 to $ 350 for an assessment of your parent’s needs, plus $ 40 to $ 150 an hour thereafter.

Whatever you do, be gentle as you plunge into this new role with your parents – with them and yourself – say those who’ve been there. Managing a parent’s housing, medical care and finances can be a burden, especially from afar, but it is also a chance to give back or smooth over decades of troubled history.

Marosy of Belmont found it “a tremendous opportunity for closure for me in my relationship with my father, which was a very hurtful one. I grew in ways I never would have expected.”

And be persuasive, not coercive, even if your parent’s pace toward solving a seemingly messy situation is slower than yours.

In extreme cases, you can get legal guardianship of a parent – if, say, you need to sell property to pay for services. But “legal intervention may not get you what you want – what you probably need is some negotiating skills,” says Nancy Coleman, director of the American Bar Association’s commission on legal problems of the elderly.

And when the going gets tough – as it will – remember what Marosy learned, as a professional and as a son. “Think about this caregiving as an opportunity. It’s almost a dress rehearsal for your own aging.

“In terms of psychological and emotional development, this is the entree to the second half of life. We can either ignore it or embrace it.”

1.   Helpful tips to remember

Specialists in aging offer the following tips for people trying to manage the care of aging parents long distance:

You break up with your girlfriend, blow an exam, start drinking every night, then come to your senses: Your friends are right – you’re depressed and should see the campus shrink.

But you’re freaked: Can the records of a few sessions with a college counselor today come back to haunt you years from now, like when you’ve just been nominated partner in a law firm?

You’re madly in love with your boyfriend. In fact, you want to marry him. But your birth control suddenly failed, so you drop in for a pregnancy test at the health service. The good news – it’s negative – is scrawled into your medical record.

You panic anew: Will there be a co-payment charge for the test on your term bill, which goes to your parents? Worse yet, could the record of your love troubles someday wind up in the wrong hands, like when you’ve decided to go for the big CEO job?

Chances are, if you’re like most students at this time of year, you’re young, strong, healthy and a lot more concerned about fitting Michelangelo and Music 1 into your schedule than something as seemingly arcane as medical confidentiality.

But maybe confidentiality should be a required course for one rather troubling reason: The rules are changing so fast that the privacy of your student medical records could end before your education does.

That, at least, is the worst-case scenario of privacy advocates who say college students may have even more to fear than the rest of us from the growing centralization and computerization of medical records, and from new laws that could undermine confidentiality for decades to come.

For one thing, you have more years of life ahead in which troubling tidbits in your record can lurk in cyberspace for employers or insurers to find. For another, you’re still learning your way around the medical system and experimenting with sex and relationships that can trigger medical visits.

But before you skip your next medical visit or decide not to tell the doctor about something important – which most emphatically is NOT the take-home message here – let’s be clear.

Many colleges do a good job with confidentiality. And there are things you can do to create your own safeguards.

Some colleges, Harvard and Wellesley to name but two, have written confidentiality policies – which you should read – that explicitly put privacy front and center, with few exceptions.

At Wellesley, for instance, “no records are released without a student’s consent unless it’s a life or death matter or unless it’s required for insurance, or the chart were subpoenaed,” says Dr. Charlotte Sanner, director of the health services.

And on-campus counseling records are “kept separate and locked up,” adds Robin Cook-Nobles, Wellesley’s counseling service director.

Other schools, like Smith and UMass/Amherst, are so concerned about privacy they offer anonymous (not just confidential) AIDS testing, which means test results don’t even go in your record. Harvard and Tufts are considering adopting similar policies.

Some argue that colleges are more sensitized to confidentiality issues than institutions in the “real world” because they’ve spent years walking the tightrope between the rights of students – who are legally adults at age 18 – and the concerns of parents, who worry about their not-quite-independent offspring – and still pay the bills.

‘Simplification’ mandated

But across the country, the privacy of medical records in general is under attack because of a series of bills recently passed or now under debate in Congress.

Just a few weeks ago, for instance, Congress passed the Kennedy-Kassebaum bill which ensures portability of benefits from job to job, but mandates “administrative simplification.”

This sets in motion a process that could give every patient a unique “identifier” like a Social Security number and create a national computer network to allow health care companies to pass records among themselves. Privacy advocates are lobbying for safeguards – like patient consent before information goes into computer data banks – but so far, with little success.

In theory, a national, cradle-to-grave database could be a boon for research, save health care costs and maybe even save your life if, say, you got sick in California and your medical records from Harvard were just a click of the mouse away.

But lifelong medical records easily accessible by computer is “a dreadful prospect,” says Beverly Woodward, a Brandeis University philosopher and privacy specialist. The new system, she wrote in a recent Washington Post op-ed piece, “will make it virtually impossible to obtain confidential medical care.”

And nowhere is the threat more worrisome than on campuses.

“It used to be that college students’ biggest worry might be if their parents were to find out some medical information, says Dr. Denise Nagel, a Lexington psychiatrist who is now president of the National Coalition for Patient Rights.

“But now the much more real danger is that the information will be available to a future employer or insurer. Because of computerization and the changing definition of confidentiality, access to private information is being given to too many people without patient consent,” she says.

“And this is particularly bad for college students because they’re away from home for the first time and most don’t think of the effects on future employers and insurers.”

“This is a big issue for us,” agrees John Roberts, director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, adding, “Things have gotten terrible in the last few weeks.”

Even without the new legislation – including other bills now in the works – medical confidentiality on campus has long been a delicate balancing act, especially if a student is in a life or death situation, or someone thinks he or she is.

Policies vary, but with dicey issues like a pregnancy or eating disorders, the policy at Harvard, for instance, is to respect confidentiality but encourage the student to talk with parents, says Dr. David S. Rosenthal, head of Harvard’s University Health Service.

Ideally, he says, doctors should “work with the student,” asking something like, “Would you like us to call your parents while you’re here?” It often works, he says, because parents like being informed and students may be relieved to have a dilemma presented by a professional.

Harvard also asks parents’ permission for any procedure, like surgery and anesthesia, necessary to save a student’s life, and informs the freshman dean or house master if a student is hospitalized, though the diagnosis is kept secret.

If university doctors feel the student is a serious risk to himself or anyone else, they will also tell parents, Rosenthal says, even if the student has not consented.

Confidentiality is closest to absolute – at Harvard and elsewhere – when it comes to revealing AIDS test results, which by state law can be released only to the adult patient involved.

Many unaware of risks

On many campuses, though, while students are fully aware of their privacy rights with AIDS testing, they are still unaware of the threats to confidentiality from new legislation.

Ariel Nason, 21, a pre-med and nutrition major at UMass/Amherst, worries that as students learn about these threats, they “may feel they can’t be open and honest. . . “I’m scared that people wouldn’t tell their doctors everything because of this.”

Tufts political science major Andi Friedman, 20, agrees, adding that her generation has “grown up knowing how easy it is to find information about things. It seems very little is truly confidential.”

In fact, the prospect of a national, computerized health data system to which numerous people have access sounds “terribly Orwellian” to Tufts junior Joel LaVangia, 20.

“I could get worked up about that,” he says, “maybe carry a sign or two.”

The solution, says Lexington psychiatrist Nagel, is not to shy away from care but to make sure health professionals know how concerned you are about confidentiality and ask their help.

After all, she says, “It’s no longer just the fear that your parents might find something out. It’s your whole future – employment and insurance.”

Brandeis philosopher Woodward agrees.

“Sometimes I thank my lucky stars I’m as old as I am, ” she adds. “If I were a student, I’d be extremely cautious.” Judy Foreman is a member of the Globe staff. Her E-mail address, via Internet is: foreman(AT SIGN SYMBOL)globe.com

A student’s guide to Greater Boston’s colleges, entertainment, employment, apartments, and more, is available on Globe Online at http://www.boston.com. The keyword is: On Campus.

Other sources for this column: Harvard University, and Kathleen Dias, patient advocate; Tufts University, Bobbie Knabel, dean of students, and Michelle Bowdler, director of health services; UMass/Amherst, Bernette Melby, director of health services.

Also, Mass. Department of Public Health, Mindy Mazur, assistant director of HIV counselling, testing and client services, and Carl Rosenfield, deputy general counsel at the state Department of Public Health; Colin J. Zick, a lawyer at Foley, Hoag & Eliot who specializes in health care and confidentiality.

Confidential tips

Privacy advocates, lawyers, university health officials and others suggest the following tips for college students concerned about the confidentiality of medical and psychiatric records.

• Know what kind of health insurance you have and read the section on confidentiality. Ask health care professionals how your personal information will be handled.
• In particular, ask under what circumstances your records would be revealed, and to whom. If you’re also covered by your parents’ insurance, find out if they signed a waiver allowing release of confidential information that may apply to you, too.
• Ask what services, including lab tests, might show up on your regular term bill, and who gets copies of it. If you have a test for something sensitive – pregnancy, say, or a sexually transmitted disease – consider paying for it yourself so nothing shows up on your term bill or your insurer’s records.
• Or, consider a do-it-yourself pregnancy test. If it’s positive, though, you should seek medical care.
• Ask where records are stored and who has access to them.
• If you’ve signed a waiver in advance to release confidential information under certain conditions, ask to be informed every time information is released.
• An up-to-date copy of your records, read them, and ask for changes if you find anything untrue or worrisome. If you’re worried about a particular office visit, negotiate with the school to have that part of the record stored separately so it is not released if an employer or insurer asks for your record.
• Find out if counseling records are merged with medical records and ask to have yours kept separate. With on-campus counseling, ask if information is ever divulged to school officials.
• If you discuss issues like sexual orientation with your caregiver, ask if it’s necessary to put this in your record.
• Ask if your medical and/or psychiatric records are computerized; if there’s a choice, ask that they not be.
• For AIDS testing, consider anonymous, not just confidential, testing and go off campus if necessary. The state Department of Public Health has a list of AIDS test sites (1-800-750-2016). But many college students are actually at low risk, so state officials urge you not to use this program needlessly.
• Use cau Law Institute, 617-867-7881 (for AIDS-related issues).

Also the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, 617-482-3170 may be of assistance.