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nal guidelines accordingly.
"The healthcare system is routinely missing critical opportunities to identify and treat HIV-infected individualsin emergency rooms, doctors' offices, veteran's hospitals and prisons," said conference co-chair Dr. Ken Mayer, Director of the Brown University AIDS Program. "As a result, many patients are not tested until late in the disease, even when there are clear indicators of infection."
Late to Test, Early to Die
"The whole point of routine testing is to stop transmission and late entry to care," Miller said. "But new data show that late entry to care is a more serious problem than previously known and is costing years of healthy life."
Data show rates of late testing that are over 50 percent in many populations, rather than the prior national estimate of 40 percent. "Late testers" are those who develop HIV within a year of diagnosisor are already sick with AIDS when diagnosed. This means their infection had progressed undetected for up to a decade.
"As individual institutions begin to screen for HIV, they are starting to catch the men and women who have fallen into the crevasses of the health system," Miller said.
In one ER, 93 percent of new cases had full-blown AIDS at the time of diagnosis; in another ER, 56 percent of patients had AIDS. A study of prisoners in South Carolina found that 59 percent were late testers, and in the VA Medical Center in Washington, DC, 100 percent of newly diagnosed veterans identified during the study were already severely ill with AIDS.
Furthermore, a recent study underscored the value of early, routine testing, showing that patients who started treatment earlierwhen CD4 cell counts were below 500 rather than 350had a marked benefit: a 70 percent improved chance of survival in each year that follows.
Barriers to Routine Testing
"When it comes to HIV testing, the health care system is stuck in the past," s
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| Contact: Katy Lenard klenard@burnesscommunications.com 202-494-2584 Forum for Collaborative HIV Research Source:Eurekalert |
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