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Targeted HIV Testing More Effective than CDC Mass Testing Proposal |
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From EurekAlert! - Breaking News: A targeted campaign of testing and counseling aimed at those who are at high risk for HIV would be more effective than the mass patient screening proposed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), according to an analysis by David Holtgrave, PhD, an expert on HIV prevention at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. For the same price, a targeted testing and counseling approach would identify more than three times as many people with HIV and could prevent four times as many new HIV infections compared to the CDC's testing strategy. To identify more Americans with HIV, the CDC has recommended that doctors in the United States test all patients aged 13 to 64 for HIV at every health care visit, unless the patient opts out, or specifically declines to be tested. "While the CDC's recommended opt-out testing offers some public health benefit, the data shows there would be substantially more benefit from a more targeted program that includes rather than discards risk reduction counseling---including more diagnosed infections and more transmissions prevented," said Holtgrave, who is professor and chair of the Bloomberg School's Department of Health, Behavior and Society. Using standard methods of cost-effectiveness analysis, Holtgrave estimates that CDC's recommended opt-out testing program would cost $864 million. For the same cost, a program of targeted counseling and testing would diagnose 188,170 new HIV infections, compared with 56,940 that would be detected through CDC's testing plan, assuming 1 percent of the population tested is HIV positive.
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