Released: September 22, 2006

CDC drops AIDS test counseling guidelines

Source: By Steve Sternberg, USA Today

AIDS virus testing should be offered regularly to everyone ages 13 to 64 in every hospital, doctor’s office and clinic to speed diagnosis and help curb the epidemic, federal health officials recommended Thursday. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recommendations are not legally binding, but they are designed to make HIV testing as routine as tests for high blood pressure, cholesterol and diabetes.

About 1 million people in the USA are HIV-positive, but 250,000 of them have not been diagnosed, according to the CDC. “It will allow us to identify a lot of people who have HIV and don’t know it,” the CDC’s Timothy Mastro says.

The guidelines no longer require health workers to provide special counseling before and after the test, and they lift the requirement that patients supply specific written consent, though patients must be given the opportunity to refuse testing.

Daniel Kuritzkes of the University of Colorado, chair of the HIV Medicine Association, says, “I think the guidelines will help destigmatize HIV testing by making it part of routine medical care and not a test with some special mystique about it.”

More than a dozen AIDS advocacy groups released a statement objecting to the decision to drop counseling.

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