Vancouver wants to expand HIV/AIDS testing

[oneh2obabe]

Fong, Petti
Western Bureau

VANCOUVER—Public health officials in Vancouver want to expand HIV/AIDS testing to every sexually active person who visits their family doctor or is admitted into emergency care at the hospital in an effort to end the disease.

The chief medical officer for Vancouver Coastal Health said the push in the final year of the four-year program will be on convincing family doctors to give HIV/AIDS tests as routinely as other blood tests.

Dr. Patricia Daly said Thursday despite widespread knowledge of HIV/AIDS, an estimated 25 per cent of people with the virus don’t even know they are infected.

The hope is to get people tested earlier before the disease progresses so that treatment can ease their symptoms and reduce the rate of the virus spreading.

“Research has shown that treating people makes them less infectious to others and since we don’t have a vaccine yet, this is the best hope we have to stop the spread of the virus,” she said.

Since the project started four years ago, testing rates have gone up by 37 per cent to nearly 90,000 people tested a year.

Daly said HIV testing is considered cost-effective if it identifies one in 1,000 cases. The increased testing in Vancouver has increased the identification of HIV cases to one in 100.

Almost everyone offered an HIV test accepts and public health officials have used it effectively to test pregnant women. Making the test routine has dramatically decreased the rate of infection from mothers to newborns.

Daly said the ones who need convincing now are doctors; for years, public health officials have drilled in the message that the only people who need testing are those categorized as high risk, which includes bi-sexual men, gay men, patients with more than one sex partner and intravenous drug users.

In the past, barriers to giving patients HIV tests were created — including recommendations that counsellors be available — but Daly said the message should now be that an HIV test is routine.

Scott Harrison, program director of Urban Health, HIV/AIDS at Providence Health Care, said when St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver began offering HIV testing to every patient it became the first hospital in Canada to make the test routine.

“Now we want to change history on a local and global level and finally put an end to HIV,” he said in a statement. “Forty per cent of people infected with HIV in Vancouver are diagnosed late with advanced HIV disease.”

Vancouver is the first city in Canada to advocate offering HIV tests as a routine test to sexually active patients coming in for emergency care at its hospitals and on visits to their family doctor.

Ken Buchanan, with the advocacy and support group Positive Living, an organization that helps people who have tested positive for HIV, said Thursday that he has some concerns about whether such massive testing will give patients enough privacy and information about who might know their status afterwards.

“But we do encourage people to be tested and they sooner they know whether they’re HIV-positive, the sooner they can get on medication,” he said. “That’s the very good thing about testing — earlier results.”

http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/arti ... ds-testing

[FreeRights]

I'm just waiting for others to chime in how it's a violation of privacy, etc.

That said, I think it would be an excellent step in the right direction.

[JayByrd]

It wouldn't be a violation of privacy unless it was made mandatory. The article isn't suggesting that.

[FreeRights]

It wouldn't be a violation of privacy unless it was made mandatory. The article isn't suggesting that.

I misread it.

I'd be in favor of mandatory testing.