( age to proven life-prolonging care and...)Boosting HIV screening can increase survival and is cost effective

Rochelle Walensky, assistant professor of medicine at Harvard and a co-author of the study, added, "The HIV epidemic is no longer confined to a handful of easily identifiable risk groups, yet current approaches to HIV testing are still focused on these sub-populations. The result is that 280,000 Americans with HIV remain unaware of their infection. Efforts to promote and finance routine, population-based HIV screening should be pursued aggressively."

Douglas K. Owens, M.D., of the VA Palo Alto Health Care System, and his team at the VA, Stanford and St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto, led another study in NEJM, which strongly supports Paltiel's findings. They developed a computer model to estimate the health benefits and expenditures of performing voluntary HIV screening programs in health care settings. They also found that screening for HIV infection is cost-effective relative to other commonly accepted screening programs and medical treatments.

Referring to the Yale/Harvard findings, Owens said, "It's exciting that a completely independent analysis had the same findings as we did. Both of these studies show that screening is life-prolonging and affordable."

The Yale/Harvard study was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Other authors on the study included Milton C. Weinstein and George R. Seage III of Harvard School of Public Health; Kenneth A. Freedberg of the Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard School of Public Health and Boston University School of Public Health; April D. Kimmel and Hong Zhang of the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School; and Elena Losina of Boston University School of Public Health.