Knowledge is power: Testing everyone for HIV status

New CDC recommendations call for streamlining HIV testing processes to facilitate widespread screening.

Editorial. Oct. 23/30, 2006.

Two important facts come to mind when thinking about HIV testing:

• Right now, more than 250,000 Americans are believed to be living with HIV, unaware of their infections.
• Nearly 40% of people with HIV are diagnosed within a year of developing full-blown AIDS, when it may be too late to benefit fully from treatment.

These numbers underscore the continued urgency of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and point to a clear course of action to address it. After all, knowledge is power.

People need to know their HIV-positive status so they can protect themselves and their partners as well as have access to new life-extending treatments and therapies as early as possible to give them the best chance at a future.

These are the realities behind new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommendations for HIV testing in the health care setting. The guidelines are a step forward in controlling the spread of this deadly virus.

The CDC begins with a straightforward ask -- that HIV screening become a routine part of medical care for all patients between the ages of 13 and 64. The guidelines also include other provisions to streamline these efforts.

Previous recommendations, for instance, called for HIV testing in health care settings with high HIV prevalence -- above 1% -- and for all high-risk individuals. But physicians reported that such data often were not available and that time constraints made conducting risk assessments unwieldy.