Routine HIV screening recommended on Worlds' AIDS day

Philadelphia, United States, December 1: The American College of Physicians (ACP) announced today on Worlds’ AIDS Day that the American healthcare professionals must offer testing to all patients above 13 years for human immunodeficiency virus (HIVdefine) which causes AIDS, as a way to identify people who unknowingly carry the disease and might pass it to others.

Two years ago, the U.S. Centers for Disease and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, U.S. issued similar guidelines recommending people between the ages of 13 and 64 years to be routinely tested in all healthcare settings. However, a panel of HIVdefine experts said those tests are rarely being performed.

Until 2006, the CDC only recommended testing people who were at greater risk of getting HIV, and those who already have symptoms.

A senior medical associate of the American College of Physicians in Philadelphia, and the lead author of the guideline, Amir Qaseem, said, “ACP recommends that physicians adopt a routine screening policy for HIV and encourage their patients to get tested, regardless of their risk factors.”

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that approximately 60,000 people in United States alone were infected with HIV past year and 50 to 70 percent of new cases of sexually transmitted infections are spread by people who do not even know that they are infected.

The doctors consider people at 'high risk' of HIV if they have shared needles or if they have had a history of blood transfusion between 1978 and 1985. Sexual activities such as having multiple sexual partners, unprotected sex, having intercourse with persons being treated for sexually transmitted diseases or men who have had sex with men after 1975 also put a person at risk of getting HIV.

The new guidelines appear on the Annals of Internal Medicine website at www.annals.org.