Guidelines set to make AIDS testing a part of routine healthcare checkups have helped get more Americans tested for the disease that claims the lives of more than 2 million people annually worldwide, but more than half of US adults still have no idea if they are infected or not, government researchers reported Tuesday.
Nearly 83 million Americans have been tested for AIDS, 11.4 million since the guidelines were established in 2006, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
But CDC director Dr. Thomas Frieden said as many as 200,000 Americans are infected with the virus and do not know it. “The numbers show that progress is possible,” he told a news conference.
But the numbers also show that “progress is needed,” he added. “To see a steady improvement in just a two or three year period, I think, is quite encouraging. It’s progress but it’s not success.”
The CDC estimates that 1.1 million Americans are infected with human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS, with 56,000 new infections every year.
The CDC’s Dr. Jonathan Mermin told Reuters that people who do not know they are infected are far more likely to infect someone else with the incurable virus.
“People who know they are positive cut their risky behaviors in half,” Frieden said.
While there is no known cure for HIV and AIDS, a host of drugs can keep people healthy and studies also show that HIV patients who take the drugs are less likely to transmit the virus, which is spread through blood, semen, breast milk and by use of contaminated needles.
In 2006, instead of having people ask for HIV tests, the CDC said people should be automatically tested for the disease unless they opt out. “It should be a normal, routine part of care,” said Frieden.
“Today’s data shows that following those recommendations, there was a significant increase in the number of Americans who were tested for the first time,” he added.
Last year, an estimated 45 percent of Americans between ages 18 and 64 reported that they had an HIV test at least once in their lives, up from 40 percent in 2006. That equals an increase of 11 million people who have ever been screened, the CDC reported.
“Despite this progress, 55 percent of adults, and 28.3 percent of adults with a risk factor for HIV, have not been tested,” the CDC noted.
And 32 percent of people diagnosed with HIV in 2007 progressed to AIDS within 12 months. “In other words, they had unknowingly been infected with HIV for years without being diagnosed,” Mermin said.
On average, it takes 10 years for a person infected with HIV to develop AIDS if he or she is not treated.
Because more people are getting tested, fewer people are being diagnosed late with HIV, said Frieden. In 2007, about a third of infections were discovered late, an improvement from 37 percent diagnosed earlier in the decade. Frieden said those cases are often only detected when the disease has progressed to AIDS.
Dr. John Bartlett of Johns Hopkins University called the testing figures disappointing. “It’s an incremental gain,” Bartlett, an infectious disease specialist, told The Associated Press.
He said that when the CDC changed the guidelines, many states still had laws that required special counseling before and after HIV tests. Most states have since dropped the restrictions, but there are still some obstructions. Maryland, for example, still requires doctors to note the patient’s consent on charts.
More screening could be done if hospitals were pressured to adopt routine testing of patients by Medicare or hospital groups, said Bartlett.
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