These Days, Getting a Once-in-a-Lifetime HIV Test Just Isn't Enough Lorie A. Parch - TakePart
go to original March 21, 2013

HIV Testing PSA by Michael Pozos (InstructorBlock)

If you happened to be a young adult in the 1980s and 1990s, getting an HIV test was something you probably did if you had any reason to think you might be at risk of infection (e.g., you were having sex). And if you didn’t get tested (and even if you did), you probably worried.

These days, though, getting an HIV test isn’t something most people talk (or seem to worry) much about anymore. But it’s something we should be doing much more often, says new research out of Northwestern University. The team of researchers, led by Aaron Lucas, a graduate researcher, and Benjamin Armbruster, an assistant professor of industrial engineering and management sciences at Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, found that the current HIV screening recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) - put in place in 2006 - are too conservative. The CDC currently recommends that people at low risk of HIV should be tested only once in their lifetime, and that those at highest-risk - people with multiple sex partners, IV drug users, and sex workers - should be tested every three years.

Men who have sex with men have the highest rate of new HIV infections; the CDC recommends that this group be tested every three to six months. The CDC says that in 2009, about two in five of all new HIV infections were in people ages 13 to 29.

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