There is a debate on about whether it would be worthwhile to carry out early HIV testing on large sections of the population. Should our entire population get routine AIDS testing, rather than targeting those groups at high risk? There is new evidence tonight that says we should promote early HIV testing, and that it could have important public health ramifications.
Almost a third of Americans infected with HIV don’t know it.
Yet, today, it’s easy to conduct early HIV tests that can detect the virus accurately. Currently in the United States, diagnosis of AIDS usually occurs at a more advanced stage of the disease, when the patient comes in with a serious illness due to the HIV virus. Early screening would help patients get access to care before they get severely ill, and according to this study, would prolong life
Now two articles in the latest New England Journal of Medicine indicate that widespread early HIV tests, in other words everyone getting an AIDS test, would help improve the quality of care of infected individuals, at what would be a reasonable cost.
Dr. David Paltiel is the Yale University School of Medicine researcher who authored one of the studies. He says, “The interesting thing about this study is that it says the traditional at-risk populations have evolved and so we should be moving away from the idea of profiling and targeting screening to particular populations, and thinking of a much more routine, broadly based HIV screening policy.”
“Early HIV tests will ensure that we detect the infection into time to link people not only to effective treatment, but also to effective counseling which obviously pays a benefit to the rest of the population.”
The researchers says that early HIV tests would ensure that more people would be diagnosed when they’re healthy rather than when they’re seriously sick, because the person would have higher T-cell counts, the immune cells that fight infection and which disappear with AIDS.
Both studies show the effects of early HIV testing would extend the life of those infected, on average, by one and a half years.
“280,000 people are currently slipping between the cracks. We know how to care for these people but at the present time they are undetected, unable to access proven care and are not being counseled. There is a likelihood that they will transmit the disease to others, the end result being that expanded HIV testing really ought to be geared up aggressively,” says Dr. Peltier.
Dr. Peltier says the most difficult question that this study does not address is: who is going to pay for all this testing?
He says just because something confers excellent value, which the studies show HIV testing does, it doesn’t mean that it comes cheap. Early HIV testing is expensive and he says we need to think about how it’s going to be implemented and who is going to pay for it.
If someone wants to check his or her HIV status, many places offer early HIV testing, including local health departments, private doctors' offices and hospitals.
The CDC National AIDS Hotline can refer you to testing sites 24 hours a day, 365 days a year at: 1-800-342-AIDS (1-800-342-2437).