Targeting HIV better than broad screening -study

Source: Reuters
By Julie Steenhuysen

CHICAGO, June 11 (Reuters) - A program targeting people most likely to be infected with HIV and offering counseling to prevent further infection would be far more effective than the government's recommendations for mass testing, U.S. researchers said on Monday.

They said the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's recommendations for widespread HIV testing of those aged 13 to 64, regardless of risk, would cost $864 million a year.

The CDC's recommendations for mass screening would not require counseling, and patients could opt out of testing if they chose.

A plan that targets those at high risk and offers counseling services could pick up more than three times as many people with HIV and could prevent four times as many new infections -- all for the same price, according to an analysis by David Holtgrave, an expert on HIV prevention at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore.

"It's really a question of which policy would be more effective," said Holtgrave, whose study appears in the June edition of the journal PLoS Medicine.

His analysis found that the CDC's new testing strategy -- announced in September -- could diagnose nearly 57,000 cases of HIV in a one-year period.

But a strategy that zeros in on likely targets of HIV infection -- by geography, health care setting or risky behavior -- would identify 188,000 people with the disease out of an estimated 250,000 to 300,000 people in the United States living with HIV but not knowing they are infected.
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