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Study questions CDC's recommendations for HIV screening

Infection Control Monitor, June 15, 2007

A new study released this month finds that testing only those people at high risk of HIV, rather than the mass testing recommended by the CDC, is a better strategy for diagnosing HIV infections and helping stop the spread of the virus.

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, according to an analysis by David Holtgrave, an expert on HIV prevention at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore.  The study appears in the June edition of the journal PLoS Medicine.

The CDC in September recommended health professionals offer every patient aged 13 to 64 HIV testing, where patients would not require counseling and could opt out of testing if they chose. Holtgrave's analysis found that the CDC's new testing strategy 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, such as those with 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, the study said.

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