Universal HIV tests would have big impact: Study
Source: Reuters
By Michael Kahn, Reuters
LONDON (Reuters) - Near-universal HIV tests and immediate drug treatment for people who test positive would almost eliminate transmission of the deadly virus within a decade, a computer model showed on Wednesday.
Doing this would cost more initially but then save money down the road because there would be fewer HIV-infected people to treat, Reuben Granich and colleagues at the World Health Organization wrote in the journal The Lancet.
The researchers emphasized their findings do not represent new WHO policy or any other guidance but rather stand as a call for discussion on how to better tackle the AIDS epidemic and the role of so-called antiretroviral drugs.
“Although other prevention strategies, alone or in combination, could substantially reduce HIV incidence, our model suggests that only universal voluntary HIV testing and immediate initiation of antiretroviral drugs could reduce transmission to the point at which elimination might be feasible by 2020 for a generalized epidemic, such as that in South Africa,” they wrote.
Granich and colleagues used data from South Africa as a test case for a generalized epidemic in their model, which assumed all HIV transmission was through heterosexual sex.
This showed that voluntary screening in which at least 90 percent of the population took part, and immediate drug treatment for those testing positive, could reduce HIV transmission by more than 95 percent within 10 years.
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Source: Reuters
April 24th, 2009 at 5:25 am
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May 26th, 2009 at 4:25 pm
How ironic that Cuba was vilified for many years for doing routine early testing (of pregnant women,people going in for surgery, those coming back from abroad, blood donors — as well as the entire blood supply) although this clearly is one of the reasons Cuba has the lowest HIV/AIDS rate in the region, and perhaps in the world. (And contrary to what many opponents claimed, a Cuban could always choose not to be tested except in the case of blood donors, whose only choice if they didn’t want their blood tested was to not donate -a reasonable requirement, I think, given the vast numbers of people who died from untested blood transfusions.)
It would be helpful if this study could be replicated among homosexuals and bisexuals to see if it would also apply to that high risk population.