Expanded HIV Testing Pays Off: Studies

Screenings at emergency rooms, gay pride events cited by researchers.

By Amanda Gardner
HealthDay Reporter
Thursday, June 21, 2007; 12:00 AM

Copyright © 2007 ScoutNews, LLC. All rights reserved.

THURSDAY, June 21 (HealthDay News) -- Making HIV screening routine in emergency rooms and at gay pride events expands the number of people getting tested and helps those who are HIV-positive get access to needed health care, new research found.

About one-quarter of the estimated one million people in the United States infected with the virus that causes AIDS don't know they have it. Consequently, they are at heightened risk for transmitting the virus to others, according to two reports published in the June 22 issue of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

The reports come out just in time for National HIV Testing Day, June 27, and planned gay pride celebrations in many U.S. cities this weekend.

Study co-author Patrick Sullivan is chief of the behavioral and clinical surveillance branch, part of the CDC's division of HIV/AIDS Prevention. He said, "Routinely offering testing at emergency departments for people seeking care for other conditions is feasible and acceptable. The goal is to make testing available to as many people as possible."

"This is an important strategy to help people know their status," he said.

For the first report, researchers analyzed routine HIV testing that had been implemented in one hospital emergency department in Los Angeles, one in New York City and one in Oakland, Calif., in 2004 and 2005 as part of a CDC initiative.

Between January 2005 and March 2006, 186,415 people visited the emergency departments, 18.6 percent of whom (34,627) were offered rapid HIV tests. Nearly 60 percent (almost 21,000) of those offered agreed to be tested, and 9,365 received a rapid test.

Of those tested, 1 percent (97 patients) received a preliminary positive result for HIV infection, and 88 percent of those identified as HIV-positive were linked to appropriate care.

If only those persons reporting risky behaviors (male-to-male sexual contact, intravenous drug use, commercial sex work, or diagnosis of a sexually transmitted disease) had been offered testing, 48 percent of the people with newly diagnosed HIV infection would not have been tested, the study said.