BALTIMORE, June 15 (UPI) -- An expert says a campaign of testing and counseling for those most at risk for HIV would be better than the mass screening proposed by the U.S. government.
An analysis by David Holtgrave, an expert on HIV prevention at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, in Baltimore, determined that the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control's testing strategy is likely to cost $864 million for one year.
For the same price, a targeted testing and counseling approach would identify more than three times as many people with HIV and could prevent four times as many new HIV infections compared to the CDC's testing strategy, according to the study published in the journal PLoS Medicine.
The CDC estimates that 25 percent of Americans with HIV do not know they are HIV positive, do not seek treatment and are at greater risk of spreading HIV. To identify more Americans with HIV, the CDC has recommended that U.S. doctors test all patients aged 13 to 64 for HIV at every healthcare visit, unless the patient opts out, or specifically declines to be tested.
